Okay, so here’s the skinny: my Macbook hasn’t been powered on since, oh, Sunday or so, and my sole internet & blogging implement at home has been my iPod Touch (where I’m typing this until I can find the time to post it somehow).

Things are more than a little crazy, and not only because family calls seem to be mostly about the kid’s bowel movements and attire, both topics that I would ordinarily tune out were it not for my mildly dazed state.

Work is also somewhat on the wild side, since I still haven’t quite caught up with the few weeks’ lag brought upon by my absence and keep having to clean house and devise new strategies to cope with a killer combination of sleep deprivation and entropy.

So far, I’ve figured out that slowness has its advantages: I may be tired and sluggish, but I tend to use that to be more systematic and go through things one step at a time – and guess what, I’ve already come ahead in more than a few situations where too-quick decisions wouldn’t help.

Still, one endures. I have been racking up a quite impressive amount of starred items in Google Reader in hope that some of them may yield interesting material to write about (incidentally, I’m not too keen on the new shared notes feature, which completely mangles feed items) and have had a number of interesting discussions of late about technology in general and what the “next big things” will be for 2009 or so, so interestingness may yet win out against sleepiness.

Or, at least, one can hope for that.

P.S.: Incidentally, I couldn’t care less about Open Office being finally available with a native UI when they still haven’t gotten the Services menu to work.

The kid has been hogging the CPU of late with irregular moods, feeding times and all sorts of cruel little behavioral experiments on us puny humans, so there has been little opportunity to fire up my MacBook and type away at stuff to see if it goes away or gets filed properly. Here’s a stab at it, bearing in mind that I haven’t really had that much sleep lately.

Wild Wild Web

So Microsoft gave up on Yahoo, which raises the question of how long either of them will last in a bunch of sub-markets (what with neither of them being able to dodge the Google juggernaut in advertising, search, etc.). Should be interesting, especially since I don’t quite know if either of them will be in second place a couple of years from now.

Other stuff that hit my radar was Twitter moving away from Ruby on Rails, which was perplexing for one reason, and one reason alone: Who the, er… fricassee cares? It’s not as if it was a religious thing or something. Oh, wait…

Books

Thanks to the kid, I’ve been reading books the way people watch View-Master reels – I keep squinting bleary-eyed at the same scenes time and again to see if they move of their own accord. Still, there are a few reviews forthcoming, at the rate of a paragraph a day or something,

The Cloud

After fooling around with Evernote the other day, I started wondering about the kinds of notes I take and where I need them. As it turns out, there is a quite large amount of inconsequential information that does not require much in terms of security or privacy (such as links, which I commit to del.icio.us) and that I don’t really want to have to sync from one machine to another.

Besides, it all left me with a sense of deja vu. So I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself clicking on Google Notebook and finding a bunch of stale notes from last year which I had entirely forgotten about. Mucking about with it quickly yielded a number of conclusions, namely:

• It works fine in Firefox (but says Safari is unsupported)
• It is hopelessly outdated as far as Google web apps are concerned (browser support is flaky, SSL support is broken, and it seems to be using an older version of their libraries)
• It would only require a few minor tweaks to do everything I needed (and I could always add a bookmarklet for some JavaScript encryption script)

Furthermore, it has a lackluster API that provides read-only access to public notebooks (so extending it with a desktop client is not in the cards). Still, if someone at Google picked it up as a 20% project and made it at least as good as Google Docs (which I’m now using to keep track of shopping lists and whatnot), I think it would be killer.

Oh, that reminds me – if someone at Google lands here, please pester whomever is in charge of Reader to add at least basic filtering based on RSS category fields – Bayesian classification would be better, but its blatant disregard for feed metadata is almost insulting considering that you bothered to implement tags – which, incidentally, are not propagated on shared items. But I digress.

Movies

Going to the cinema is now tantamount to mounting a Mars expedition (i.e., it will happen in ten years or so and would end in tears if I tried it now), so movies are now a completely alien art form that I have no access to until the DVD release cycle turns. Still, I’ll be adding Iron Man to my wishlist, if only because pfig hasn’t called it crap yet¹.

Also, given that Apple shows no tendency to use their considerable clout to try to rationalize access to iTunes content worldwide (and I’m one of those people who finds it ridiculous to play around with vouchers and falsified Beverly Hills addresses² to buy movies and TV series), I’m patiently waiting to see what Sony will do with their PS3 store³.

Of course, that would require me to have a TV set. And a renovated flat. Hmmm.

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¹ And if he does, that’s likely to be an even better endorsement.

² Could it be that Apple never really checks all those Beverly Hills 90210 addresses in iTunes accounts?

³ Hint to the guys in Shinagawa – the aggregate market of European countries except the UK, France and Germany is under-addressed and very big – here, this report is only about 40.000 Yen, as much as a cup of decent coffee near your office.

Everyone’s raving about Evernote these days – and with good reason, since from my brief experience with it the UI is great, indexing works very well indeed and it’s fast.

Plus it’s multi-platform (although not all features work the same way on all platforms) and the Windows version can run in “portable” mode from a USB stick, which makes it tremendously appealing to me (I have it installed inside a TrueCrypt volume in my corporate laptop).

The thing is, despite this largish post on Evernote’s site regarding security, I’m not really sure I’ll be using its syncing features – at least not for now.

You see, when I was reading that post I thought this passage was slightly odd:

When you add a note to the service, it is secured like your email would be at a high-end email provider. This means that your notes are stored in a private, locked cage at a guarded data center that can only be accessed by a small number of Evernote operations personnel. Administrative maintenance on these servers can only be performed through secure, encrypted communications by the same set of people. All network access to these servers is similarly protected by a set of firewalls and hardened servers. Your login information is only transmitted to the servers in encrypted form over SSL, and your passwords are not directly stored on any of our systems.

Emphasis mine, of course.

But, you see, I thought it very odd that SSL was only mentioned for password transfer, so I decided to dig up a packet analyzer and submit Evernote to what I like to call the iDisk test – i.e., verify if the data is transmitted securely or not.

Why? Well, I am the sort of person who, knowing that data transmission security is an end-to-end affair, uses SSL for everything, from IMAP to Google Reader. Security is not just about authentication and making sure your passwords are safe. It’s also about making sure your data is safe, whether or not it’s stored in a secure vault¹.

And that includes using “high-end email providers” such as, erm, .Mac and Google Apps For Your Domain.

Which, in fact, provide me with secure end-to-end transmission of data over SSL, and where I currently store my stuff² via IMAP.

What many people don’t seem to realize when designing online services these days is that it is a trivial endeavor for anyone to sniff out your stuff from the air in a public Wi-Fi hotspot.

Plus the internet runs through a lot of strange places (like hotel and college networks), so I like to know how my data is transmitted, no matter how inconsequential it happens to be.

So I fired up Evernote and created a simple note:

I then fired up a packet sniffer and hit the sync button. I had no trouble finding my note among the captured packets:

This can be reproduced by anyone in, oh, around 5 minutes or so (go and grab CPA, it’s simple and straightforward to use). Sniffing other people’s packets is left as an (unethical and unadvisable) exercise to the reader.

It is true that Evernote logs in (and apparently does a bit more) over SSL, but for some reason it falls back to plain, unfettered (and quite readable) HTTP to transmit your data to their servers.

Which might be understandable for performance reasons, but which is regrettable in a service that aims to help you store and manage your information across multiple machines.

Maybe this will get fixed after the preview (it’s nothing that a few SSL accelerator cards can’t solve), but until then, and despite its brilliance in other regards, I have to rate Evernote it a D- security-wise.

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¹ And even then I’d only consider the storage truly secure if it was encrypted as well, but that’s another matter – I accept that decrypting stuff from disk on the fly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

² Interested parties may want to pick up MailArchive, clean it up a bit, and make it store stuff via IMAP and SSL – Spotlight will index the results just fine, although not with the same style and panache as Evernote. And for extra brownie points, build a Cocoa text editor that stores its stuff directly into IMAP.

Very decent (and free) file synchronization utility for Windows. Supports several syncing modes that avoid common pitfalls such as erroneously propagating deletions back to a master folder.

A few weeks back, soon after the release of their beta Mac drivers, the kind folk at DisplayLink mailed me one of their USB adapters, pretty much out of the blue (I have corresponded with them in the past, but the opportunity to tinker with their solution at leisure was a great surprise). I got a DVI one with a very spiffy cable:

Being temporarily bereft of a desk at home¹ I was unable to try it out properly there, but on a whim I set it up in a VM inside Fusion without any Mac drivers (thanks to Fusion’s great USB support), causing XP to believe it had an extra monitor:

This was mostly because I wanted to see how Fusion handled USB devices that are unsupported by the host (since I often have to test USB devices on Windows), but also because I had been musing about the feasibility of having an XP VM act as a “secondary computer” of sorts (yes, I keep thinking about thin clients of all kinds).

At work, however, I was able to hook up the adapter to the MacBook Pro I have at hand and get it working without any hassles over lunchtime – my desk layout these days is a pain and I had to rig it via one of the USB extension cords we ship with USB modems, but I was able to run two external displays without any hassles whatsoever – one via the built-in DVI port and another via the DisplayLink DVI.

Sorry, no (public) pictures – I’ve got a whole bunch of sensitive stuff on my desk these days…

Performance was good enough for a bunch of terminal windows and web pages, although I did come across a few screen redraw issues exactly as outlined in the release notes.

Having no graphics acceleration means, of course, that the user experience is far from ideal, but the important thing is that it worked as advertised – it was just another display, and popped up in all the right places as such (i.e., in System Preferences, menu bar, etc.).

Connecting it to my XP laptop (a Dell D410) yielded a very responsive display, indistinguishable from the usual performance I get from the Intel GMA 950’s external VGA port (and actually a little better, since the component sourcing guys at Dell must be cheapskates and its video out is somewhat noisy).

And this is where the potential sinks in: Since I loathe docking stations, I use a USB KVM to hook up an external keyboard and mouse to my laptop – which means that I have to plug in the power, video and USB plugs every time I arrive at my desk, but which I vastly prefer to XP’s fundamentally broken “Undock Computer” option. So if I was using a USB hub instead of the KVM, I could simply plug the dongle there and cut that to two cables – power and everything else.

But back to performance, and back to the Mac: The bottom line is that for a beta of something that they managed to do without significant support from Apple, the beta DisplayLink driver is very impressive.

The overall experience was not unlike using an older Mac (like my iBook G3), and I see no reason why Apple shouldn’t give them a hand developing this further – or even adopting their tech and pumping it up a notch².

I await further driver developments with interest – in the meantime, all I have to do is persuade my wife to let me buy a couple of 24” displays…

¹ A more accurate statement would be that I am bereft of both a desk and a home, since the damn renovation isn’t finished yet. But I digress.

² Can you say ‘30” Studio Displays with Wireless USB?’ That kind of connectivity would fit the MacBook Air like a glove. And it works today.”