Backup Strategy

You have to back up your files. Only my Mom does not have to. She is new to the computers world, and the only things she has been using are online applications (all from Google), namely Gmail, Documents and Spreadsheets. So Google admins take care of her data. But you have to back up. I doubt you have everything already moved to an online service. So... what do you use for backup? Windows backup? Ok, this was a joke. What if you plan to migrate to MacOS or Linux some day? Do you want your data to be left in some proprietary format? If you think, you probably back up individual files and directories, in their native format. Like pictures in *.jpg and music in *.mp3 and so on... So how do you track what has already been backed up and what hasn't? My "MyDocuments" folder contains some 50 thousand files. Far too many to keep track of them manually.

For several years I have been using a very nice utility, called SyncToy from Microsoft. Some of you may not be eager to put a job as serious as a backup in the hands of Microsoft, let alone a toy from Microsoft (I wonder what sort of a budget they had to come up with a name for a backup utility?). But if you trust me, I can really recommend this tool. For two years or so it has not lost a single file and I moved the entire backup set between at least two machines and three or more backup drives... The principle of SyncToy is a folder pair you create. One on your PC, the other on your backup device (an external USB drive in most cases I suppose). SyncToy has several modes of dealing with the folder pair. It can synchronize everything, or for example just echo the changes from one folder to the other. And it is clever. Even if you mess something up (like accidentally delete a folder and synchronize the delete action), the worst case is all the deleted files will be in your wastebasket. SyncToy is fast. As I have said, I synchronize the entire 50 thousand files MyDocuments folder every couple of days and the entire procedure is a matter of minute or two.

So do yourself a favor. Get an USB drive (around $100 or less), get the SyncToy and back up your data. You deserve a good sleep. Backup helps.

Google Office Update

I have already talked about Google Office. Just two months later we have a brilliant integration of spreadsheets and documents (formerly Writely, redirecting now to http://docs.google.com). The suite may not be enterprise ready yet, but it surely does almost everything a typical consumer may want to do with document editor or a spreadsheet. We used to use an Open Office at home, but are migrating towards the Google Documents and Spreadsheets. The starting point for the service is a list of recently edited documents, sharing with family members and others is a no brainier (just enter an email address and that is it). And we are moving our picture library to http://picasaweb.google.com, although the sharing model within Picasa should be improved to match the overall security of the documents service.

Google Calendar has made some significant improvements in the meantime as well. What is especially important (and has been reflected in the recent blowout earnings report) are the international aspects of the Calendar service. I was really impressed when I saw the reminders could be delivered by SMSes and I could pick my local Polish operator from the list. Not every American company thinks this way, especially Yahoo is very US-centric and this again is reflected in the earnings.

Skeptics keep on saying Google Office will never find its way into the enterprise market, because businesses don't want to let their documents out to 3rd party servers. First, I do not agree with them, as keeping data at Google is nothing different from keeping money in the bank. Banks know how to secure our funds, so do professional providers of Internet services. Second, one can easily imagine a Google Search Appliance being transformed into a Google Enterprise Server (I wrote about it exactly a year ago, and it has almost happened).

The strategy is clear and the trend is clear. Money goes to the bank, nobody keeps dollars in socks at home. The same applies to digital data. Keeping it at home is simply unsafe. Disks do brake down and burglars hunt for computers. And as your money is fully accessible via the network of ATMs and credit cards, so will be your data, from any web-capable machine.

Gmail on channel 14

The recent IPTV buzz brings to my mind another convergence story. Television and Web applications together. The match seems natural. Assuming the screen you will be using for IPTV is going to be a HD (High Definition, where minimum resolution is defined as 1280x720 with 1366x768 being more common), makes it quite reasonable to display a Web page on. Web on TV was approached several times in the past, but the ordinary (non-HD) TV sets used to give us just a fraction of what was needed (544x372, which was about 5 times less than HD).

And the IPTV screen is connected to the Internet, where it streams the content (movies, news, shows) from. OK, so we have two important components of an Internet-enabled PC already in place. A screen and a connection. What else is needed?

Input controller. I hate remote controls. I have dozens of them scattered around. I use just 1% of the functionality they provide. Volume up / volume down (that refers to the TV set), channel up / channel down (that refers to the set top box), on/off (both). Six functions and I have two remotes with 89 buttons together to do that... We have some serious problem here. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Guess what - the Wii from Nintendo, with its absolutely marvelous controller. Look how many buttons there are - just a few, the rest is done by the motion sensing technology. Think of it as a mouse that does not need a pad or any other surface. Just gestures in the air. So just imagine that by tuning in to the channel 14 will get you to your GMail account (or Yahoo Finance or Google Reader). Basically to any Web page you visit frequently. Sitting in the armchair, watching the Discovery channel on 13, switch to 14 and read your mail, without moving to the computer. Navigate with the motion sensing Wii-like wand, switch to 15 to watch your stocks portfolio or to 16 to read a bulletin board of your interest. Then go back to 13 for the next show on Discovery. Converged experience. One screen, one connection, one paradigm. Is there anything else missing?

Applications platform. What is the difference between a Discovery channel and a GMail? Discovery is [just] streamed to the screen from the IP network. All is needed on the IPTV set itself is a decoder, converting a media stream to a video image. In HDTV world most of them are being made by Sigma Designs, and I blogged on them in the Opera on Your TV. Sigma is potentially able to run the Opera browser, including AJAX, on their chip. So it may already be able to display your GMail page... But there is a difference between running and running. The difference is speed. While it may be absolutely true the Sigma SMP8630 can run Opera browser and AJAX applications, it may be a little slow at doing that. Recently, at Telecosm X, I had a chance to ask the question about applications performance to Ken Lowe, VP of Sigma Designs. And his words were "we are barely keeping up with the HD stream decoding task". That means, there is a very little room left for the Web applications. In the meantime the applications themselves are getting more and more power hungry. Like the new Google Reader - it is nice, but eats a lot of CPU cycles. And this may bring us to the conclusion Intel's Viiv strategy may actually work. You may want a Pentium inside your next TV set...

GPS Musings

Last week I spent most of my time traveling. The goal was the 10th annual Telecosm, at Lake Tahoe, California. But going across the Atlantic for the two mind-blowing days, I always try to see some more places on the way. This time I picked Dallas, TX as the destination of my flight and then drove across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada up to Tahoe. As I have been using GPS navigation even when driving around my home town, I thought it would be a good idea to rent a GPS unit as an option together with my car. What a disappointment it was!

I got something looking like an old mobile phone. Antenna, keypad, small monochrome display. After many months with a Kenwood unit built into the dashboard of the Subaru or another months of using the iGO on my HTC smartphone, the unit I was supplied with by Alamo together with the rented car was like bad memory from the past. Actually it was a Motorola iDen phone, equipped with a GPS receiver and a simple Java application capable of drawing an arrow pointing to the left or to the right. The only clever thing about this setup was the destination entry system. I had to make a call to the agent who was setting up the destination for me, and the unit retrieved the destination coordinates from the server. May be this is a good idea as an easy and alternative way to use the GPS, but it has one major fault. When there is no mobile network coverage, you cannot use the GPS to guide you. And as you probably know, the coverage in the vast and empty areas of the rural America is very spotty. So after setting up the unit at the airport I drove to my hotel. The Java application rebooted several times on the way, but fortunately the road was easy and I made my way to the destination. Next day I turned the thing on, just to see it cannot start due to lack of mobile network connectivity. And this was the last time I tried it. Bad, bad, bad idea.

But as I was traveling and taking pictures, I kept on uploading them to the Picasa Web galleries (have a look). Picasa has this nice feature allowing you to "Geotag" the pictures. Geotagging works in tandem with Google Earth and correlates position coordinates with actual pictures stored in Picasa. Very nice feature, but really requires some work, to pick the picture, find the corresponding place in Google Earth, and repeat the process for all pictures in he library. Wouldn't it be nice, if my camera had a built-in GPS unit, allowing it to store the position coordinates within the metadata area of JPG files? Looking at any JPG picture, you can see the camera make and model, time the picture was taken, aperture / shutter settings and so on. So isn't it a cool idea to have the geo coordinates stored there as well? Then the Google applications (Picasa, Picasa Web, Google Earth, and Google Maps) could make use of it, bringing you the enhanced slideshow option, with your pictures mixed with Google Earth animations? I cannot wait to have it. To be honest, the GPS module will be the important differentiator when I will be selecting my next digital camera. So who is the first to do this? Kodak? Sony? Will see...

The idea of a GPS-enabled camera led me to the question - how many GPS units are you going to have with you? GPSes used to be expensive (I remember the first Magellan models of late 1980s listed for 20000$). The used to consume much power and were slow, not to mention poor sensitivity and requirements of external antennas. This has changed a lot with SiRF being one of the most important contributors to the current state of GPS market. SiRF is one of my favorite companies, and its stock price ascend in 2005 helped me fund many gadgets and leisure activities. The SiRFstarIII chip took the market by storm delivering an unmatched GPS performance. I use a small, battery powered "Bluetooth GPS antenna" based on SiRF to feed satellite signals to my HTC smartphone running iGo. It is sensitive enough to be stored in a glove compartment or even under a seat and still receives the signals. There are solar - powered versions as well, so you can just place the unit somewhere on the dashboard and forget about recharging its batteries. So why not have another SiRF built in my camera?

The other nice idea is the GPS logger, a matchbox-sized, solar-powered unit. You drop it in your car, it stores all the route coordinates along the way, and after the trip you can display the trip on one of the mapping applications. This brings me to the conclusion we may be again at the right entry point to load some SiRF shares. They have been down from the 40$/2005 highs to current 20-and-a-change. SiRF is about to introduce the new chip, with even lower power consumption, possibly integrated Bluetooth (after the Impulsesoft acquisition) and even shorter fix times. The GPS devices are yet to hit the mainstream consumer market, and in the end we will have them everywhere.

Software Power

This time the story won't be about how powerful software is, but how much power it consumes. And we are not talking about processor power required to run an application either. We talk about the power consumption. Strange, you think? No longer strange... This issue affects all users, but has most impact on those who live their lives on batteries. I mean using battery powered notebooks or PDAs. The stress modern applications put on processors is growing at least along the curve of Moore's Law. And despite engineering efforts put in the design of new processors, the power consumption of portable devices is still far from what we would like to have (a notebook recharged once a month?). Recently there has been much talk about so called performance per watt, a number representing how many CPU instructions can be executed consuming a watt of energy. But does this really matter to the typical end user, who struggles to get his 3 hours of notebook life from the batteries? Performance per watt is just a theory. Real life is if you have to carry a power supply with you or if the batteries will last the entire flight over the Atlantic?

One factor that contributes the most to the practical side of the power equation is the behavior of the software you run on your machine. "I run only the Web browser" you say. Really? Have you ever seen the list of processes being executed in parallel by the Windows XP? If not, I recommend you do it. Launch the task manager (click Start->Run and type taskmgr and hit enter). Go to the Processes tab and count. My present counter shows 70 processes. Most of them have CPU load close to zero (fortunately) but this is not always the case. Start playing a movie clip and look at the CPU load. This is what drains your batteries. Modern CPUs have various so called "sleep" states. Both shallow and deeper. Sleep state is when the CPU does almost nothing and helps preserve batteries. This happens continuously, for example when you read this text. As long as nothing is "moving" on the screen, it is very likely your CPU is in a shallow sleep state, and the battery drain is reduced. But at the same time it is enough the web page contains a Flash control (most of the "rich" ads use Flash) with moving parts, and your battery goes down faster than expected. That is why I hate Flash. It drains my battery and hogs my bandwidth (still a scarce resource in mobile scenarios). But marketing web designers love Flash and that is why it won't go away anytime soon.

Other examples are the recent remarks of Windows Vista power drain generated by the new Aero Glass library. Think twice before you opt for a new Vista notebook. In the end this may not be what you expect... And there are tons of application related power problems. Like the MindManager eating the idle cycles and preventing the CPU from entering the shallow sleep mode. The most ironic case I was fighting with just last week was the IBM ThinkPad Battery Maximizer application (SIC!!!). The small green battery state indicator present on all IBM and Lenovo notebooks. Its main purpose is - as the name implies - to help you maximize the battery life. Yet for some unknown reason the version I have tends to fall in some endless loop condition, resulting in >90% CPU utilization, bringing the entire computer to its knees and draining the battery like an engine starter in winter. So think twice before you install any new and nice application on your machine. And watch the Task Manager. If you care...