Thursday March 17, 2005

Portable Electronic Devices?

In the interest of safety, on most airlines flight attendants are saying:

"Please turn off all portable electronic devices"

So can I keep using my non-portable electronic devices?

If so, how did I get them on the airplane in the first place?

But isn't everything on an airplane, including the airplane, portable?

So why the distinction?

( Mar 17 2005, 04:15:32 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [1]

My new phone

I have recently purchased a new phone, a PalmOne Treo 650. While I have had PDAs and I have had phones, this is my first entry into the converged handset world.

I had a slow start getting it activated. I had purchased the unlocked GSM version directly from PalmOne (before the $100 price increase) and needed a SIM card. I battled through the Cingular/AT&T customer no-support having to deal with such discussions such as "You can't have that voice plan because it is a PDA not a phone!" to which I responded "But I can make phone calls with it!", which provoked "But its a PDA not a phone". Repeat for 5 minutes...

Eventually I got someone who knew what they were talking about and quickly got the order in and a promise that the SIM would be FedEx'd the next day.

A week later no SIM...

More calls and a further promise that it is on its way, must have gotten slowed down by the holiday.

A week later no SIM...

More calls just to discover that the order was cancelled. Why? "It just happens sometimes."

One last order and they finally get it right, I get my SIM, and I have voice and data access!

So next steps are the obvious ones of loading the phone with all my contacts and other data that was on my previous PDA. Along the way I am impressed by the integration and easy of use. The camera and screen are of decent quality, not that I have much desire to take or send low-res pictures with a phone.

Now it is time to start really using the Treo for its capabilities. I initially setup in VersaMail (any relationship to the BofA VersaTeller?) application to read my personal RoadRunner POP mail account. Works great! Now to send a message, uh-oh, no relaying allowed. Some googling and reading about anti-SPAM features that virtually mandate mail servers to not relay mail that did not originate from or are not destined for their network. One interesting solution is to go to smtp.com which for a fee will be your SMTP mail server for a particular From: address. Their Family Plan is ideal for the low volume a PDA will generate. But the real solution is to just use one of the available, put poorly advertised, SMTP servers on your wireless carrier's network. In my case the old AT&T wireless network uses smtp.mymmode.com (the old smtp.attwireless.net is going away).

Now things are getting more interesting!

Next step is to figure out how to get e-mail from my sun.com account. Sun is currently running a pilot program to allow external access to e-mail through an "edge" server using all of the appropriate security tricks. However, as a true geek I want access to all the services I have from my laptop which means I need a VPN tunnel. According to PalmOne's web site, there are only two listed VPN for PalmOS providers, one does PPTP and the other IPSec. Sun of course uses Cisco 3000's and IPSec so the solution is movianVPN by Certicom. Unfortunately Certicom has got out of the retail sales of movianVPN so you must purchase it from an Irish supplier WorldNet21 Technology. A few Euros later and a trivial configuration, I am through the firewall accessing my e-mail at work!

Given the bulk of the e-mail I get at work, even after SPAM filtering, the included VersaMail was not up for the job. Its IMAP handler was very slow to determine changes on a large Inbox and it is also limited to only being able to store messages in the Treo's RAM and not in the optional SD card. So the next step up was to try out SnapperMail, a full featured e-mail client that works well and has a very good support forum over in Yahoo Groups. (ChatterEmail is another alternative.)

The last critical piece for a geek is to be able to SSH into a system. So I just grabbed PSSH for free, and my reading glasses, and I am in!

Now the only question is if this has made me more productive or just busier?

( Mar 17 2005, 01:34:47 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [3]