I had to re-partition a hard disk recently.

If you don’t know what that is, you’ll appreciate the whole point of this article.

The deal about “partitioning” a hard disk is to define how it is to be used.

In my case, I had a computer with Windows 7 on it. I wanted to install Linux (another operating system) on that same computer. So I wanted to create some space on the hard disk for Linux. The task of creating this space is the task of “re-partitioning’ the hard disk.

By now you will probably appreciate the fact that re-partitioning a hard disk is not something you’ll do everyday.

This is something that the folks at Paragon Software Group seem to understand well. They sell a software tool, the Paragon Partition Manager, to help you re-partition your hard disk. Price: $39.95.

They also sell a version that has a single-use license for a mere $9.95.

Think about it. How often would anyone need to repartition a hard disk? Mostly never. But when you do, you’ll probably just do it once. Like me.

So a low-cost single-use license for this kind of product makes absolute sense. It caters to someone who knows that he needs to partition his hard disk just once and doesn’t want to pay too much for a full-blown partitioning tool.

You might argue that Paragon doesn’t have to create such a product: I would have had to pay $39.95 for the full product and still just use it once. They would have made four times the revenue.

But then, at $39.95 would I still choose Paragon’s Partition Manager? Probably not.

There are a several competing products out there with varying capabilities and cost. Windows 7 itself includes a (free) partitioning tool, which unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are Paragon) doesn’t work well in all cases.

By creating this low-cost, single-use version of its partitioning tool, Paragon has a very well positioned product that neatly balances price with capabilities.

The big news of the week is “cablegate” aka the thousands of confidential US diplomatic documents that are being made public by WikiLeaks.

While the contents of the leaked cables range from the bizarre (Gaddafi’s blonde companion) to evidence of illegal behavior (spying on UN officials), the outcome of all this is that diplomacy will go on as before. There is no alternative to diplomacy. Even war, after all, is diplomacy by other means…

The impact of the leak on the culture and values of Western democratic societies will be more serious.

Western politicians of all stripes have called various actions on Julian Assange (WikiLeaks’ founder), ranging from hunting him down like Osama Bin Laden to assassination by drone.

What ever happened to Western concepts of judicial due process and the assumption of innocence?

While politicians can be forgiven for acting like politicians, after all, they have their constituents to answer to (in theory at least; in practice, US politicians answer to their campaign donors), the actions of companies like Amazon and EveryDNS are more worrisome.

When WikiLeaks came under intense denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, the website was moved to Amazon’s EC2 hosting service. On Wednesday, Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, citing pressure from US Senator Joe Lieberman.

On Friday, EveryDNS.net took down the wikileaks.org domain name, citing WikiLeaks’ violation of EveryDNS’s acceptable use policy.

Another company, Tableau Software, bowing to pressure from Senator Lieberman, “removed from the Internet visualisations of the US Embassy cables”.

This is all very worrisome because it shows how it easy it is shut down a website. All you need is a little bit of political pressure. And all this is achieved without judicial review and due process.

Is that what Western freedoms and liberties have come to? What happened to freedom of speech?

The problem is not whether what WikiLeaks did was legal or acceptable. There are processes in the system for dealing with cases like these, including a potential grand jury indictment against Julian Assange.

Resorting to what is essentially censorship is absolutely not the way to deal with WikiLeaks.

Believe me when I say I know what censorship is. The general perception is that China started the art of Internet censorship with its “great firewall”.

The reality is that in 1996, as the Internet became popular in Singapore (a country that has NOTHING to do with China), the government there started considering ways to control what its citizens had access to on the Internet. The primary target was online pornography but free and unfettered political expression was also a concern. As a start, all private Internet traffic had to pass through government-controlled proxy servers. Unapproved websites were blocked. At some point, the government considered requiring local website owners to register with the government, in the same way that printed media publishers had to obtain government licenses. I don’t know if this was ever put into practice because I had left Singapore by then.

I know this because I organized a petition drive to oppose the Singapore government’s move to censor and control the Internet. There have even been articles written about that petition.

What I see happening to WikiLeaks is more of the same: attempts at control and censorship. And it is scary. When politicians call the shots, who is next? After all, as the maxim goes: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (members of the Irgun/Haganah who later became Israeli leaders and Nelson Mandela/ANC come to mind). If your website upsets a politician or political party, will it be shutdown through direct and indirect political pressure? If that happens and you lack the technical skills of the WikiLeaks crew, what is your recourse?

The fact is that Western countries don’t need this. The system in place is robust enough to handle WikiLeaks, Al Qaeda terrorism and more. After all, this same system survived a 44-year cold war with the Soviet Union with most of our freedoms intact.

I am a long time T-Mobile subscriber and was able to sign up to pre-order the G2.

Unfortunately, probably because I am not eligible for an upgrade, I was unable to actually pre-order the G2 until the day before it was released in the stores. Other T-Mobile customers were able to pre-order a week in advance.

If you have not been able to follow the frenetic pace of releases of new Android devices, the G2 is one of T-Mobile’s latest Android phones. It is a Google-experience device. This means that it has an almost stock version of Android 2.2 (aka Froyo). Other devices like the Samsung Galaxy S or the various Droids, are built with custom graphical user interfaces e.g. HTC’s Sense UI.

Unboxing: The few photos below show the unboxing of my G2. I bought it at a Radioshack store for a $50 markup over the T-Mobile price. Ouch!

Box view

Another box view

The phone in the box

View of the phone

Accessories: AC adaptor, USB cable, headset

Battery, battery cover...

I upgraded to the G2 from a MyTouch Slide. I like the available of a physical keyboard. It allows me to enter text faster and with fewer errors. An onscreen, touch keyboard is also available for occasions where I am using the device in portrait mode.

The pics below so the differences in size between the Slide and the G2.

Left: G2, Right: MyTouch Slide

The G2 is slightly thinner

With the keyboards out, the G2 is definitely thinner

Again, overall, the G2 is smaller than the Slide

The other big deal about the G2 is that it is HSPA+ capable. HSPA+ is T-Mobile’s 4G-ish network and is meant to compete against Sprint’s WiMAX-based 4G and (in the future) Verizon’s LTE.

On the MyTouch Slide, you get a little 3G symbol when you are using the HSPA network and an E symbol when only EDGE is available. On the G2, you get an H symbol (see picture) when HSPA is available.

H symbol -> HSPA

I installed the SpeedTest app to test the network connection speed.

HSPA+ is supposed to be available in the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley, but where I work and live, I was only able to get download speeds of less than 1Mbps. Ouch.

The only place where I was able to get the advertised HSPA+ speed was while sitting outside the Borders bookstore in download Palo Alto/University Avenue. There, I got something like 4Mbps download, even faster than my home DSL!

The blogo-/twitter-sphere was briefly alit last week when this article came out on TechCrunch.

I think the simplest explanation is probably the correct one in this case: Google is working on a 3G/Broadband connection manager for Chrome OS and they working with Verizon to validate it on the Verizon network.

The bigger question though, in my mind, is what kind of device will Chrome OS appear on?

Android, Google’s “other” OS, is coming along strong and is poised to overtake Apple’s iOS in terms of shipment volume. Android is no longer limited to smartphones. It will be shipping on everything from music/media players to tablets from Samsung and Motorola.

How will Chrome OS fit in this picture?

One possibility is that Chrome OS will ship on regular PCs as a companion OS to Windows. A well known example of such an approach (and I would say the “pioneer” in this space) is DeviceVM’s Splashtop. This alternate OS environment ships on notebooks from HP, Lenovo, Dell etc and allows the user to get onto the Internet within seconds of powering up his PC, without having to boot up Windows.

However, this approach is not game changing. DeviceVM is already shipping such a solution.

What is will be game changing however, is to leverage the lightweight nature of Chrome OS and ship it on inexpensive hardware. Conceivably, we would be talking about sub-$200 netbooks/tablets with Chrome OS as the sole operating system. An old blog article from ARM.com alludes to this approach.

In other words, Chrome OS will not be Android’s “big brother”, but it will be the lightweight, single-purpose younger brother. If you want an all-in-one multi-purpose mobile device, get one with Android. If you want an inexpensive bring-you-to-the Internet device with a great web browsing experience, get one with Chrome OS.

This makes sense in a way. The Android web browser today, for example, is really quite limited. Firstly, by the small screen size and low screen resolution of the devices it appears on. Secondly, popular Chrome browser features like bookmarks sync, extensions are not (yet) available for it.

A somewhat single-purpose device still makes sense if they are low-cost enough. We have seen that Amazon’s Kindle continues to sell strongly in spite of the iPad.

What is Verizon’s role in this scenario?

Verizon has been selling 3G/broadband-capable notebooks and netbooks. A natural extension to this product portfolio will be an Internet tablet.

The business model can also get interesting here. For example, the consumer gets a Chrome OS tablet for free when she signs up for a 2-year data plan. Google and Verizon monetize from both the subscription and ad revenue that result from the use of Google services and web properties.

Update (11am PDT): Just saw this on Engadget: Chrome OS tablet coming from Google and Verizon on Black Friday?

Update (5pm PDT): Looks like the Engadget article is all speculation. The link above has been updated. The source of this speculation, Lee Matthews, probably read someone’s blog about Chrome OS (ahem…cough) and added more sauce to the mix…

Disclaimer: I am a Senior Director, Program Management at DevicevM. I wrote this article to express my personal views.

I finally found time to power on the Streak to run it through the initial user set up.

This out-of-box experience (OOBE) is what distinguishes the Dell Streak from the other Android devices I’ve seen so far. As you will see below, a simple OOBE application runs the first-time user through the different components of the user interface.

This is the boot up screen:

The boot time is a little long and disconcerting because other than an initial sound effect, nothing really happens at this stage. Is the system dead?

When the system finally comes up, you get to select your language:

Then you have a quick introduction to the various buttons etc:

You also get an introduction the menu bar, which is the bar at the top of the screen. The icon here drops down a panel to access all the applications:

“Additional views” here actually refer to additional desktops that you can create, above and beyond the 4 that are already created for you:

The notification area is a section of the menu bar:

Explanation of what information status area contains:

The ubiquitous Android “back” button. You can see that it is designed in such a way that the orientation of the device during normal use is expected to be horizontal (landscape mode).

What the “menu” button is about:

What the “home” button is about:

The last screen of the OOBE contains more tips:

This is the home screen:

This is screen #3. The theme of this screen is communications (contacts, messaging and Gmail):

Screen 4 is the social, media, entertainment center:

Tapping on the arrow will drop down an abbreviated menu with a set of commonly used applications. This fixes one of the usability problems of the Android application list: that there are too many icons to scroll through if you need to look for a particular application.

Clicking on “more” will get you the full list of applications:

View of the web browser with the keyboard:

So how does the physically large screen help the web browser experience? The resolution here is 800×480. Unfortunately, most modern websites are designed with a screen width of 1024 in mind. Here is an example of this blog on the Streak. Notice that the right column is cut off.

The same webpage on an iPad which has a 1024 pixel wide screen.

And there we have it. I will continue to use the Streak and post my observations on Twitter: @benchong408

Yay!

I fell in love with Firefox 3 beta 3 for its speed (compared to Firefox 2) on the Mac and started using it almost exclusively.

Then beta 4 came out and it was slooooow! And crash-prone too!

Now that RC1 (aka release candidate) is out, I am in love with Firefox again. It’s as fast as beta 3 and hasn’t crashed on me yet.

Well, okay, once bitten twice shy. So I’ve upgraded and will use RC1 but I’m saving the love for later.

The RC1 is available for download here.

Craigslist or Craig’s List is a free, online classified ads website that is eating the lunch of traditional printed classified advertising.

The first time visitor might be tempted to think that you can find anything on Craigslist. Just like on Ebay (famously illustrated by that scene in Men in Black 2). Nothing is further from the truth.

Craigslist is a pretty small outfit so employees themselves don’t do the policing.

Instead, the site depends on the “community” (i.e. users) to “flag” inappropriate ads.

To put it unkindly, the community police are like your nosy neighbor. You know, that guy down the street who is always peering through the window blinds and who calls city hall every time you park more than 18 inches away from the curb? I used to have a neighbor like that and he denounced everyone living in the street to the point where he had no more friends. During  WWII, these people would have denounced young Jewish girls to the Nazis.

The good thing about Craigslist, is that they use a democratic system for removing posts. They don’t depend on complaints from just one single, cranky person. Instead, a post needs to be flagged many times before it can be removed. Which is nice. I wished the San Jose city hall would do that.

Obviously, to be removed, a post needs to violate posting guidelines. I had a post removed once and it was in violation of some very obscure rule which even the Craigslist community forum folks had trouble figuring out. Which goes to show that some people need to get a life that is outside of memorizing Craigslist posting guidelines…

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I found out the office hours of the community police.

Some Craigslist newbies tend to put up the same car ad multiple times, listing them as being sold in different cities/counties in the SF Bay Area. This violates one of the posting guidelines: thou shalt not put up multiple posts to sell the same item within X hours.

At 7am this morning, I found multiple violations which had not been removed. Wow!

At 7.45am, the posts had been removed.

My guess: folks wake up at 7+ in the morning, turn on their PCs, make coffee, skim Craigslist. And start flagging ads for removing.

So if you are a newbie advertising on Craigslist, put up your ads early in the morning. Preferably before 7am.

The problem is: the people you are targeting probably keep the same hours as the Craigslist community police…

Last Friday, I left a Windows Vista notebook running over the weekend because I needed to download an ISO image.

For the non-techies, an ISO image is a copy of a CD that exists as a file your hard disk. You can use the ISO image to re-create a copy of the CD. ISO images tend to be very big. The one that I was downloading was more than 600MB in size.

This morning, when I came into the office, the notebook had been powered off.

What the….!?

I found out that Vista had downloaded an update and had automatically powered off the notebook after that update.

Needless to day, my download was 95% done when that happened.

Think of this: the download was for work. Now I have to restart the download and WAIT for it to complete. Think of how much money this is costing my company in terms of manhour costs.

Multiply that by the number of Vista users and you can imagine how much Vista is costing businesses in wasted time.

This automatic-shutdown-after-an-update feature of Windows is of a monumental stupidity.

I have had that happen to me while I was running virtual machines on another PC: the host operating system (which was XP) shut down by itself after an update. All this without first shutting down the guest operating systems that were running on the virtual machines. This is like powering off a PC without first shutting down the operating system. A big NO-NO.

I cannot imagine what must be going on in the heads of those people in Redmond when they came up with this scheme. Were the technical aspects of “doing it right” so daunting that they had to take such a shortcut?

For this is an engineering shortcut. There is no doubt about it.

Unfortunately, it just kills the user experience and wastes everyone else’s time and money.

For the purposes of work, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 Linux on a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

For some strange reason this morning, the Ubuntu virtual disk was just going on and on, spinning away and responsiveness was near zero.

Running “top” showed that a daemon called trackerd was eating a bunch of CPU cycles.

A quick search on Google revealed that trackerd indexes your hard disk for quicker searches.

Does that sound familiar?

Anyone who has encountered Windows Vista would have seen that same problem: the total lack of responsiveness in the user interface while the hard disk chugs away.

One would think that the Linux folks are generally more “progressive” than the people at Redmond.

But nooooo! As they say:”Fools seldom differ”.

OS X Leopard also has the same problem.

I think the issue is that no one in a product development organization goes through the end-to-end experience of an average user. Usually, someone has a machine all set up and all he does is to plunk in new binaries and run them.

On the other hand, the average user has a brand new computer and has to go through all that initial set up (and indexing à la trackerd/Vista).

So development organizations have to sit at the place of the end user and really examine every step the user goes through. Only then will their products be really user friendly.

I am still waiting…

And I am not referring to that blue screen of surprise that earlier versions of Windows are famous for.

Increasing numbers of people are shopping online. Usually, at the end of the shopping process, after you have entered your credit card information, you get a web page that confirms your purchase and includes any additional information to track or use the purchase e.g. order number, software registration code.

Common sense tells you that you should print out the web page and save it “just in case”.

Trouble is, you either end up with yet-another sheet of paper to misplace or you are at the airport with no access to a printer.

Here’s where Apple continues to pleasantly surprise.

OS X has always had the ability to print to PDF files (unlike Windows). This means that you don’t need to fork out mucho $$$$ for a copy of Adobe Acrobat to generate PDF files.  All you need to do is to print the document and then select the option to route the output to a PDF file.

With Leopard, Apple has gone one step further by automating the creation of the PDF file and where to place it. See the screenshot below.

If you just made an online purchase, all you need to do is to print out that last order confirmation page, click on the PDF button and select the “Print PDF to Web Receipts Folder” option. The confirmation web page is automatically converted to a PDF file, and saved to that folder, which is found in your Documents folder.

The screenshot below is of my online registration for the Santa Cruz Wharf-to-Wharf race. The PDF file is saved as “SignMeUp.com – Payment – Wharf to Wharf Race 2008″. How is that for a totally meaningful file name?

Rather than spending years coming up with a whiz-bang Windows Vista equivalent, Apple concentrated on features that actually makes sense to the average user. That is why as I continue to use my MacBook Pro full-time (work, school etc), I continue to be amazed at all the new stuff that I can do.

When Windows tries to be smart, it feels paternalistic: that it knows better than you and you spend time arguing with it.

OS X, on the other hand, makes you feel smart because you can now do all this new stuff!