IT

USB enabled flash memory drives have become popular as a floppy replacement (Dell actually offers them as such). They come in all sizes and capacities, most often 64 or 128MB, are usually shaped like keychain fobs. One model, the Intelligent Stick from PQI is particularly compact as they got rid of the USB connector metal shield to make it merely as thick as two stacked quarters. I keep mine in my wallet, with a basic toolkit of Windows debugging utilities and important scanned documents (passport, e.g.).

There’s not much to say about it – these gizmos are pretty much commodities nowadays. The remarkably thin design is very convenient, of course, although it also means the intelligent stick can’t be used on a keychain. The ferrule-free connector design mostly works, but in some rare cases it can lack traction and have problems staying put in a USB socket. In spite of the compact size, PQI managed to put a tiny write-protect switch (you can see it at the right of the stick on the picture) and an activity indicator LED, both nice touches.

Update (2003-11-07):

They are now also available in 256MB and reportedly 512MB sizes, and now ship with a USB adapter that has a complete metal ferrule for those rare situations where the simplified connector does not stay put.

Update (2004-12-07):

The Intelligent Stick is now available in 1GB capacity, and supports USB 2.0.

Phil Windley quoted me as a skeptic. Since his website is widely read and this is a hot-button issue for many people, I would just like to clarify my position on the issue.

I think open source is quasi-necessary but not sufficient for true security. Closed source solutions basically means blind trust in a vendor. I wouldn’t take relatively serious vendors like Oracle or Sun at face value, let alone one with a chequered past like Microsoft.

That said, the availability of source is not in itself a guarantee that security bugs will be found proactively, for two reasons:

1. The “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” fallacy. While this may be true of a known bug, security is like the proverbial weakest link in a chain. Once a security bug is identified, it is relatively easy to fix and distribute, the real problem is becoming aware of its existence in the first place. This can only be done by systematic source audits searching for patterns like buffer overflows. This kind of systematic audit, as practised by the OpenBSD team or some companies like SuSE is neither easy nor cheap. It will certainly not come about because a casual source browser stumbled upon an issue

2. Secondly, even a full audit of source code is not sufficient to identify all vulnerabilities. Ken Thompson, the inventor of Unix, demonstrated this in his classic paper Reflections on Trusting Trust (PDF) where he put a backdoor into the login program and successfully concealed his tracks in the source by moving the backdoor to bootstrapped compiler binaries.

From CNET News.com:

Flat-panel monitors to take market lead

Flat-panel monitors for desktop computers are expected to surpass traditional cathode ray tube monitors in revenue this year, a sea change for the display industry.

And a good thing too. CRT monitors contain large quantities of toxic materials such as lead, and their disposal comes at a terrible human cost. All my home desktop machines now have LCD monitors. If you are in the market for a monitor, please spend the extra $100 or so. Your eyes and the planet will thank you.

Yamaha announced they will exit the CD-RW drive market. They make the excellent CRW-F1 drive, which is unique in that is capable of imprinting messages such as titles in the unused portion of the disc. The user interface for this “Disc@T2” feature is somewhat clunky, but this is a great feature that is easily worth the price premium in my opinion. Unfortunately, it seems my opinion is not shared and most people would rather pay less for a commodity than pay for innovation.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, Kenwood discontinued its line of 72x CD-ROM drives a year or two ago. When mine failed, I had no spare and no alternative but to get a noisier, slower Sony 52x. The Kenwood drives managed this by using a Zen Research beam splitter head to read multiple tracks in parallel, and thus did not need to rotate the disc as fast and induce as much vibration as conventional designs.

This time, I am prepared and I am hoarding 2 of these Yamaha drives before stocks run out…

I used Bluetooth for the first time today, to Hotsync my Palm Tungsten T with my laptop using a D-Link DBT-120 USB Bluetooth adapter. Pretty spiffy, and not much slower than standard USB synchronization.

Update (2003-01-30):

I have also synchronized my new SonyEricsson T68i Bluetooth-enabled cell phone with Outlook, as well as with iSync on my iMac G4. The process is painfully slow (probably due to sluggish software), but the end result is pretty cool. It seems Bluetooth is where USB was in 1995, i.e. barely functional drivers and not that reliable (my Sony phone has a tendency to unpair itself from my Tungsten T or my PC), but it has potential. You will just have to wait a couple of years until driver support migrates deep into the OS (unless you use a Mac, of course).