I happened upon the site WebSiteOptimization.com and started testing the performance of my site. I was astounded by how long it would take to load the front page of my site over a 14.4 kbps modem connection. True, not many people use a modem connection anymore, but still, 130 seconds is a long time to wait! Now this the time required to load every last image, not the the time required before the page starts to render and become readable, but still there is room for improvement. So I started playing around with performance settings and quickly made some substantial gains.

First of all, I enabled the WordPress CSS-Compress plug-in, which compressed the CSS file and all of the images referenced within it, which reduced the number of HTTP requests. Secondly, I enabled GZIP compression (through the Options -> Reading -> "WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them" option.) I noticed that the new Contact Form plugin, which I hadn't even implemented on any page, was also causing a bunch of HTTP requests, so I deactivated it. I made some substantial improvements; I noticed pages loading substantially faster on my cable connection and was very pleased. A test showed 14.4 kbps download times were reduced from 130 seconds to 40 seconds!

But then I realized why I hadn't enabled Gzip compression previously: some of my WordPress plug-ins won't work with Gzip compression enabled. According to Denis de Bernardy:

The gzip is enabled before the output buffers are actually processed, so using it prevents plugins that use output buffers (external links, admin menu, ad spaces, etc.) to work properly. The gzip option in itself should never be active anyway. Apache can do this by default, and in the cases where it does you can end up with double-gzip'ed content.

So I worked to enable compression within Apache by modifying my .htaccess file, but that just brought my site down. Mod_gzip and mod_deflate aren't supported and I'm on a shared server, so I don't have full control. So I made the call, and axed the plug-ins that weren't working, namely the plug-in that identifies external links and another that places an administrative menu bar across the top of my site (for me only.) I really like those plugins, but they are not worth the performance hit. Until I find a way to enable Apache (server-controlled) compression, I'm going to go without them.

Total HTTP Requests: 30 | after: 11

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Times (before | after)
14.4K 130.70 seconds | after: 40.22 seconds
28.8K 68.35 seconds | after: 21.51 seconds
33.6K 59.44 seconds | after: 18.84 seconds
56K 38.07 seconds | after: 12.42 seconds
ISDN 128K 15.82 seconds | after: 5.75 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 6.85 seconds | after: 3.06 seconds
*Note that these download times are based on the full connection rate for ISDN and T1 connections. Modem connections (56Kbps or less) are corrected by a packet loss factor of 0.7. All download times include delays due to round-trip latency with an average of 0.2 seconds per object. With 30 total objects for this page, that computes to a total lag time due to latency of 6 seconds. Note also that this download time calculation does not take into account delays due to XHTML parsing and rendering.

A few months ago, I noticed I was approaching my bandwidth limits on my hosting account. Switching hosting providers is a pain, so I decided to move some high-bandwidth graphics to Amazon S3, where the bandwidth is cheap and unlimited. All was well until I realized that Google was returning search results pointing to my bucket on s3.amazonaws.com instead of carltonbale.com. Luckily, AmazonAWS has a work-around. You can use your own domain name in an Amazon S3 bucket. Here are the instructions on how to do it, from beginning to end.

Introductory Steps for new Amazon S3 Users:

1. First of all, obviously, you need your own domain name and your own Amazon S3 account
2. Secondly, you need a way to create/manage Amazon S3 buckets, so you'll need to install a client on your PC.
   • I recommend using Bucket Explorer, which is a full-featured and easy-to-use client that runs on Windows and Linux; (a Mac version is in private beta and should be available Oct 2007). A free, less-featured alternative is the S3 Organizer add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
   • Install your application of choice and either:
     • Open Bucket Explorer -or-
     • Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 organizer, and click the Manage Accounts button
   • Enter your AmazonAWS Access Key and Secret Key
     • These are available by going to http://aws.amazon.com, mousing-over the "Your Web Services Account" in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting "AWS Access Identifiers"
     • 

How to Alias your Subdomain to an Amazon S3 Bucket:

1. Identify the exact domain name you want to forward to Amazon S3. S3 is not a web server, so I would not recommend forwarding your entire domain there, but rather a sub-domain. The sub-domain I'm going to use is the actual one I setup: s3.carltonbale.com
2. Create a new "bucket" (a.k.a. folder) by clicking the "create folder/bucket" icon. Name the bucket exactly what your sub-domain name is.
   • Example bucket name: s3.carltonbale.com
   • Note: you must use a unique bucket name; you won't be able to create bucket if the name is already being used by someone else.
3. Now comes the tricky part: modifying your DNS server settings. The procedures on how to do this vary by host and software system, but are the general steps:
   • Logon to your web host control panel and select "Manage DNS Server Settings" or similar
   • Create a new CNAME entry for your domain. For my example of s3.carltonbale.com, the entry was:
     • Name: s3
     • Type: CNAME
     • Value: s3.amazonaws.com.
     • (If you are an European users, use s3-external-3.amazonaws.com. instead)
   • And yes, the dot at the end of "s3.amazonaws.com." is correct, at least for me. Look at your other entries to figure out what your should enter.
4. Now comes the hardest part: waiting. It took about 2 hours for my subdomain to be recognized by AmazonAWS.
5. Open the subdomain name in your browser. You should now be able to access your files through any of 3 urls:
   1. subdomain.domain.com (which is also the bucket name)
   2. your_bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com
   3. s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name

Final Steps

1. You'll need to set permissions on your bucket and the files within using your favorite bucket management tool. I recommend setting the bucket permission to "full control by owner" only and setting the permissions of the files within the bucket to "full control by owner, read access for everyone". This will prevent people from being able to browse/list the files in your bucket.
2. If you don't want Google (or Google Images) to index the files in your subdomain, create a file named robots.txt containing the following and copy it into your bucket:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That's it, my start-to-finish guide on how to use your own domain name with Amazon S3. If I missed something or if something isn't clear, let me know in the comments and I'll fix it.

I needed a new server case due to Antec P180 case becoming much to cramped. After reading many positive forums posts about the Cooler Master Stacker cases, I made my purchase. Here are my thoughts.

To be clear, this is the older Stacker 810 case, not the newer Stacker 830 Evolution. I think the 810 offers many for features for a much lower price; I'm not sure why the 830 is even around.

Th Stacker 810 is a great case if you have a bunch of drives and need a large, well cooled case. If you purchase 2 additional 4-in-3 modules, this case has 14 5.25" drive bays, so it can handle 12 hard drives plus a DVD and a floppy drive. It is extremely large inside and can easily handle pretty much any motherbaord, plus there is a removable motherboard tray. There is a 120mm fan on the top as well as one on the front of each drive bay and the case has provision for two power supplies (one above and one below the motherboard tray.)

My DVD drive was very easy to install in the case, just place a plastic guide rail on the side and slide it into the locking drive bay.

The 4-in-3 drive bay (which fits four 3.5" hard drives in three 5.25" bays and includes a 120mm cooling fan) was not so easy. The drives are secured using screws, but there are 2 panels and 4 rails that must be held in place before sliding it into the front of the case. And if you take it out, it completely fall apart. I would prefer these snap together somehow, but I guess I won't be removing the drives all that often.

If you really want to stretch the capacity of the case, you can use three SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-in-3 hot-swap SATA enclosures and fit 15 hard drives plus two more 5.25" drives. Personally, I think spending more on drive enclosures than you do on a case is a waste of money. I seen no need to hot-swap drives in a home server, but it is an option if you need the space and can tolerate the loud, high-pitched fan of these SuperMicro enclosures.

This case is designed for a bunch of airflow. The downside of this is that it creates more noise as compared to my almost-completely-sealed-and-silent Antec P180 case. The perforated covers on front of each of the Stacker 810 drive bays are great for airflow, not so great for sound blocking. Luckily, due to the large 120mm fans and super-quiet Samsung drives, the noise is a soft, background noise rather than a higher-pitched, shrill, annoying noise. But hey, this is a server case, and servers should be hidden away in a back room, and not in your living room or home theater. Cooling trumps noise for a server case, and this one has great cooling. I monitored my hard drive temps, and all were at or below 26-degrees C.

Conclusion

Pros:  This is a great case because it is very simple to work with, supports multiple motherboard sizes, has great cooling, and has a large number of drive bays. For the price, it is a very well-made server case.

Cons:  The disadvantages are that it is not super-quiet and it takes up quite a bit of space (more than it really needs to due to so much unused space inside.) Unfortunately, it does not come with a power supply and it only includes one 4-in-3 hard drive module.

Extra Info: Part Number Detail

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of different Stacker 810 cases and the differences are not clear. After some research, I figured out which is which. Here are the details and the part numbers:

• STC-T01-UW - Silver; Dual Power Supply Locations (top & bottom); ATX, mATX, BTX, mBTX motherboards
• STC-T01-UWK - Black; Dual Power Supply Locations (top & bottom; ATX, mATX, BTX, mBTX motherboards
• RC-810-SSN1 - Silver; Single Power Supply Location (bottom); ATX, mATX motherboards
• RC-810-SKN1 - Black; Single Power Supply Location (bottom); ATX, mATX motherboards

If you are looking for accessories, here are some part numbers:

• STB-3T4-E1-GP - 4-in-3 drive bay adapter with fan (case comes with 1 of these)
• RC-880-FKR1 - 3.5" drive bay cover (case comes with 1 of these)
• SPB-S01-E1 - PlexiGlass side window - Silver
• STF-B01-E1-GP - Cross-flow fan

I recently needed to share some open source files via BitTorrent and wanted to host them on my Amazon S3 account.  For those of you familiar with S3, here is the short-answer: add ?torrent to the end of the URL of a public-shared file to get the *.torrent file, so the link would be http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent

If you're new to Amazon S3, read on for more info and detailed instructions.

Why would you want to distribute a file using BitTorrent?

I wanted to do this because, when sharing a file via a torrent, you use less of your Amazon S3 bandwidth and lower your monthly expense. To be more accurate, according the S3 documentation:

The difference is that if a lot of clients are requesting the same object simultaneously via BitTorrent, then the amount of data S3 must serve to satisfy those clients will be lower than with client/server delivery.

I knew it was possible to host a torrent on S3, but wasn't quite sure how to do it. After quite a bit of searching and reading, I found that it was actually pretty easy to do.

Here are the details on how to copy a file to your Amazon S3 account, make it public, create the torrent seed / tracker, and have Amazon S3 share both the .torrent file and seed the download.

Preliminary Steps for new Amazon S3 Users:

1. You must first have an Amazon S3 account
2. Secondly, you need a way to create/manage Amazon S3 buckets, so you'll need to install a client on your PC.
   • I recommend using Bucket Explorer, which is a full-featured and easy-to-use client that runs on Windows and Linux; (a Mac version is in private beta and should be available Oct 2007). A free, less-featured alternative is the S3 Organizer add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
   • Install your application of choice and either:
     • Open Bucket Explorer -or-
     • Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 organizer, and click the Manage Accounts button
   • Enter your AmazonAWS Access Key and Secret Key
   • These are available by going to http://aws.amazon.com, mousing-over the "Your Web Services Account" in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting "AWS Access Identifiers"
   • 

How to Create and Seed a Torrent Download on Amazon S3:

1. Create a new "bucket" (a.k.a. folder) by clicking the "create folder" icon in the right-hand panel of S3 Organizer. Note: you must use a unique bucket name; you won't be able to create bucket if the name is already being used by someone else.
2. Upload the file which will be shared into the desired bucket using S3 Organizer
3. Make the bucket public read by right-clicking on the bucket name and selecting "Edit ACL". Select "Read" access for "Everyone". Note: you may also have to repeat the read access step for each file that is uploaded to the bucket.
4. Now that the file is uploaded and shared, it can be downloaded via standard http from the following location: http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name .
   • Note 1: You can also find the URL by right-clicking the file in S3 organizer and selecting Copy URL to Clipboard.
   • Note 2: Unfortunately, the file will always be available via http download, which can be faster than BitTorrent download, but will use more of your S3 bandwidth.)
5. Now you want to create the torrent file itself. Just enter the following URL: http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent and the torrent file will be created and you will be able to download it the *.torrent file to your computer.
6. You can share this downloaded *.torrent file with others via e-mail, webpage download, etc.

According to this article, you can use Amazon S3 as the torrent tracker only by following the steps above, opening the torrent file on your local PC, start seeding from your local PC, and then remove the original file. S3 will continue to be the (ultra reliable) tracker for the file but you don't have to use S3 bandwidth to share the file. To save bandwidth usage and prevent someone from going directly to the http download of the file instead of using the torrent download, it's probably best to download the small *.torrent file and share that with others instead publishing the URL to the torrent file on the Amazon S3 server.

Assuming you have the file being shared stored on your local computer, you can download the *.torrent and start seeding from your local PC without re-downloading (the shared file) from S3, further reducing your S3 bandwidth.That's it, my start-to-finish guide on how to take a file and share/seed/tracker it via BitTorrent and Amazon S3. If I missed something or if something isn't clear, let me know in the comments and I'll fix it.

I noticed a weird charge on my credit card from "Mnesvc Inc Seattle" on 9/1. I initially thought it was a fradulent charge, but it was for less than $2, so I was a little confused. After a little more research, I found that Mnesvc is really Amazon.com and this is how they are now billing their monthly Amazon Web Services, such as S3 backup. Why they made this change, I don't know, but it probably signals a move to integrate TextPayMe in some fashion. I just wish they had provided me with a more clear warning of what to expect on my credit card statement.

After two years of use, it's time to say farewell to my Palm Treo 650 and start looking for a new phone; this is my longterm wrap-up review. I've used a Palm OS device for the past 8 years. The OS is ancient and hasn't received any significant updates in years, but even so, the Palm Treo line could be so much more they just put some effort into what the consider the status quo. Palm has a new executive chairman (Jonathan Rubinstein of iPod fame), and their new Treo 500 is the first significant step forward in years. Hopefully they will continue to make improvements.

What's Great about the Treo 650

• Ability to install third-party Apps - Treo usability is lacking in many areas, but at least they allow third parties to develop software to make up for them. Password managers, area code look-ups, etc.
• Stability - Other than occasional bluetooth problems, the the Palm OS Treo 650 is extremely stable and reliable — as long as there are no third-party utilities runnings, which add great features but can cause instability with the operating system and each other.
• Battery Life - I always get at least 2 full days out of each charge, and often 4 days. Battery life has never been a problem, even with a 2-year old battery.
• The Keyboard - The keyboard with the hard keys is awesome. People praise the touchscreen keyboard of the iPhone, I'll take a Treo hard key keyboard any day.

Improvements that are Needed - for the pretty much the Entire Palm Treo Lineup

• Too Much Need for Third-Party Software: I think third party apps such be programs such as Password Managers, not utilities that modify the core operating system. But there are so many usability problems, I'd venture a guess that most every Treo Palm OS user has installed a Phone App replacement, a Calender/Launcher replacement, or a Utility to modify behavior of the O/S (Butler, Phone Technician.) These are key applications; the defaults should delight uses, not send them looking for replacements and add-on. Improve the core applications and the interface — because applications that make these type of changes to a device make it much less reliable (I've installed and then been required to uninstall enough of them to know.)
• Bluetooth Headset Auto-transfer is Annoying: When the phone rings, I want to know who is calling and whether or not I should answer it. I don't want to think if I left my bluetooth headset on, if so which pocket it is in, and decide whether or not I need to install it on my ear before answering the phone. What I'd like to see is buttons on the phone for "Ignore Call" or "Answer on Phone" or "Answer via Bluetooth Headset." I don't want the phone to auto-connect to my headset and have me yelling at my pocket while I take the phone from my ear and de-activate the headset. Apple figured this out with the iPhone and I complained about this years ago on Treo forums. But still this feature is not available.
• Power and Data Sync Connector Unreliable and Non-standard: The power connector is fine for charging at home, but I can't get it to stay in the phone when charging in the car. How about a connector with a locking mechanism on it, like Motorola has? Also, the data sync connector is very unreliable; I have to disconnect and reconnect it several times before it will sync with my laptop. I've taken a toothbrush to the contacts on the phone and there has been no improvement. Yeah, the connector has a hotsync button on it, but so what. Why not just use a mini-USB connector to attach to the PC and software to active the sync? The phone could even charge over USB. The current connector sucks. (Note: The new Palm 500 addresses this complaint!)
• No Voice Dialing: There is no voice dialing feature on any Treo. Voice dialing is available on $50 phones but not on a Treo costing several hundred dollars? Ridiculous! Sure, you can purchase the VoiceSignal software to add voice recognition, but the demo version caused me many stability problems. Palm needs to release an integrated, reliable, and fully-functional voice dialing solution.
• No WiFi: A few years ago, Palm stated that wireless carriers would not sell phones with WiFi due to potential for VoIP taking their revenue away. Now every major carrier has a WiFi phone, and Palm hasn't even released drivers to allow use of a SD WiFi card, much less a new model with built-in WiFi. They should have been the first company with a WiFi smartphone, not the last.
• Phone is Off after Crash/Reboot: My Treo did occasionally crash and reboot. When it did, the phone application would not turn on, so my phone would be off and I wouldn't know it. The phone should return to its previous state after a reboot, or at least give the user the option for it to always power-on the phone. (There are 3rd party utilities to add this feature.)
• Main buttons behave differently based on when they are pressed, leading to user confusion. There are 49 buttons and 1 switch on a Treo 650. With so many buttons, why can't they behave consistently? When you press the home button on an iPhone, it does exactly what you'd expect. Not one singe button on a Treo 650 does this!!! Here are some specific compalints:
  • When the "Home" button is pressed once, it goes to the the application list screen, showing the last-viewed category; twice or more and it switches to the next application category as well as the SD memory card applications, or prehaps a list of all applications. Why can't is just go to the same home screen each time so I know what to expect?
  • When the Green "answer button" is pressed once it turns on the phone in the phone screen; twice and it brings up the previous call list, three times and it redials the last number. And if you get stuck in the wrong one of these functions, there is no way to go back. Relegate some of these functions to soft buttons on the screen!
  • Short-cuts to applications and contacts can be assigned to keyboard keys, but shortcuts only work when the phone application is open and won't work when in any other view. Shortcuts need consistency!
    
  • When the Calender button is pressed, it displays the same daily view, which is a good thing. Repeated presses toggle the view between week, month, and daily summary/ to do. Assign discrete functions to buttons. One press of the calender button should only switch to one calender view. Assign an additional view to a double-press of the button. An action (button press) should always result in the same result!
• Bluetooth is very unstable. I have to reboot my phone every 2 weeks because it starts acting weird when using my Palm bluetooth headset and eventually stops working all together. I thought it was the headset, but eventually figured out that it was the phone causing the problems.
• Unable to Copy Files Directly To/From SD Memory Card: When connected to a computer, the SD card doesn't show up as a drive, so you can't copy software to/from the SD card. To make matters worse, Palm Desktop has a utility to copy files to the SD card, but it only allows *.prc files. To get this functionality, you have to purchase yet another third part utility. This should be included by default by Palm.
• No built-in Audio or Video Player - OK, my Treo 650 came with Real Player, but it sucks. We passed the year 2000 mark almost 8 years ago. Include a great music player with support for every file format available and a great video player with support for every video format available. Basically, if you put a great front-end on the TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player), you'd make a lot of people happy.
• A New Form Factor Is Needed: The Treo 500 / 800 is a step in the right direction. Thin is in. But how about a larger (iPhone-like) screen and a slide-out keyboard (HTC Kaiser.) In fact, why not take a HTC Titan and put your name on OS on it. It even has WiFi.
• HotSync Manager Odd Pop-up Messages: Every time I boot, I get a message stating "the selected port, COM1, is not available at this time." No kidding. My computer has never had a COM1. It has a COM4 for my Bluetooth connection, and when I open the HotSync config it shows COM4 being selected and no other options, so why must I be subjected to this error message every time I logon to my PC?

• Palm Desktop Software Availability: Why can't I download the latest released version from the Palm site? Why is it only included on a CD that shipped with my Treo? Just give me the latest download. And while I'm at it, why did it take 6 months after the launch of Windows Vista to release a beta version that is compatible? Shouldn't the beta have been available 6 months before Vista was launched?
• Palm Desktop Alarm Reminder Application Crashes: It crashes every time I come out of hibernation. When I finally reboot, the Alarm program starts and pop-up reminders from the past 2 weeks fill my screen. Why must it crash? If it does crash, why doesn't it restart itself? Shouldn't I be able to depend on it to remind me of appointments?

Conclusion

There are many, many opportunities for Palm to make improvements and delight their customers the way Apple has with the iPhone. I really hope Palm does just that.

As I stated in an earlier post, Google Reader is the best RSS Feed Reader on the Internet. However, it is not perfect. And the more I use it, the more potential for improvement I see. Here is my list of what I'd like to see changed with Google Reader:

• Lack of Different Default Views for Sites: Some websites (such as Digg.com) have hundreds of posts each day. For them, I'd like the default videw to be the List View, where it shows only the post title and the first 20 or so words from the entry. This is a much more space-efficient view and allows for quicker browsing through the headlines, since with this many entries, you're going to ignore most of them. But for sites with only a few entries, say less than 10 or so unread items, I'd like the default view to be the Expanded View, where the entire content is shown for each post. I don't like having to switch between views based on which feed I'm viewing; there needs to be a way to specify a default for each feed or specify it based on number of unread posts.
• Too Many Entries for Some Sites — Show me the Best: As I stated above, some sites have way, way too many entries for me to read all of them. Right now, I have 754 unread digg.com articles, and that's only because I used the "mark all as read" feature a day or two ago. Truthfully, I will never, ever take the time to read all of these entries and I probably should just delete my subscription to that feed. I wish Digg would provide a feed listing only the most popular of the popular stories, but they don't because they want people on their site voting up articles. So I wish Google would implement a tracking system for high volume sites, so that the most popular unread items are at the top of Google Reader, rather than the most recent.
• Too Many Entries for Some Sites — Only Show the Latest Stories: If Google Reader won't show me the most popular stories on "high volume" sites, at least autoamtically mark the older posts as "read". I'd like to see a per-site option to show "only the most recent ### number of posts."
• No Images When Using Google Reader in Offline Mode: First of all, I have to say that having an offline viewing mode for a browser-based application is awesome! I installed Google Gears, clicked the "offline" icon in Google Reader, and all the feeds could be read without an internet connection! Unfortunately, all of the offline feeds had the pictures omitted. Sure, having pictures would require more cache to be used on my PC for the offline content, but a picture is worth 1000 words in most cases, and the omission of pictures makes reading some posts worthless.

I received a flyer in the mail yesterday from DirecTV. It was touting their newest MPEG-4 HD receivers or the 100 new HD channels they will be launching in the next couple of weeks. No, it was promoting features that will be available in a TiVo software update in early 2008!

This is pretty surprising, first of all that they are releasing new features, and secondly that they once again care about TiVo customers, since they dropped TiVo as their DVR supplier many months ago. My best guess is that they know there are a lot of loyal TiVo users who are more loyal to TiVo than to DirecTV. With the TiVo HD out, this makes a jump to cable even more attractive. I just posted a couple of days ago about my plans to do just that.

The brochure touts:

What do you need to do to get the most innovative new features? Nothing. We will bring them to you!

[. . .] And know that DIRECTV and TiVo will continue to explore ways to bring future enhancements to our valued DIRECTV customers with TiVo service.

The new features are what has already been disclosed in a press release: Remote Booking via the web, a Recently Deleted Folder, and Overlap Protection. These features are great, but I wouldn't call them "the most innovative new features." If DirecTV wants to keep loyal TiVo users like me around, they need to give us some of the more advanced features, such as:

• Network support (come one - a lot of people don't even have a phone line anymore and we're sick of the "make a daily call soon message),
• Multi-Room Viewing
• TiVoToGo (or I guess it would be DirecTVToGo)
• No need to offer TiVoCast or Amazon Unbox support, because these services are (somewhat) competitors to DirecTV, just give us ways to use the content DirecTV provides.

If could get these features from DirecTV, I'd be very happy and would stick with DirecTV for a long, long time. But with only the features listed, that's not quite enough to keep me from eventually jumping to cable and a TiVo HD. However, it does bode well for a new DVR collaboration between DirecTV and TiVo. If they offer an MPEG-4 capable box with network support, it would be the ultimate combination for me. Here's hoping.

I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and I've had a couple of days to play around with it. In summary, it is one awesome piece of hardware; this is the best laptop I've used. Unfortunately, it's not perfect. Windows Vista looks beautiful, but it's pretty slow and unreliable as compared to XP. Also, battery life is shorter than I expected (due to the power hungry nVidia graphics card and maybe due to Vista power management.) Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Keyboard: This keyboard is incredible; it has a great feel to it and the large, white letters on the black keys make them very easy to read. I dislike the keyboard on my Dell D620 even more now and am not overly impressed by the feel of the MacBook Pro keyboard. The ThinkPad keyboard is the best.
• Think Light keyboard light: I love having a keyboard light! The backlit illuminated keyboard on a MacBook Pro is beautiful and extremely easy on the eyesl. The ThinkPad uses a somewhat crude yet practical approach with a single white LED above the screen that shines down on the keyboard. But when the lights are off, when you occasionally need to hunt for a key, they light works.
  • 
• nVidia Quadro NVS 140 Video Card+ Docking Station: runs my 30" Dell 3007WFP monitor at full resolution (2560×1600) with no problems. That's exactly what I need. Many laptops can't address a monitor that requires dual-link DVI; a ThinkPad with an nVidia graphics card can. The higher resolution options were not initially presented through the Windows video control panel; I had to use the nVidia control panel to select the 2560×1600 resolution.
  • Also note that DVI dual-link is a single DVI connection using 14 pins (instead of the standard 8 pins.) This allows a single DVI connector to driver high resolution monitors (above approximately 1900×1400 pixels. DVI dual-link is not the same a two DVI connectors for driving 2 monitors — see this wikipedia article.
• Clear WXGA+ Screen: The higher resolution WXGA+ screen is extremely clear and very easy to read. I was concerned that the font may be difficult to read at this high of a pixel density, but it is very sharp and clear using the default Windows settings.
• Fingerprint reader: It has worked flawlessly after I got through the initial print entry. I love how quickly I can now sign-on to Windows; it makes the multi-user feature of Windows pain-free.
• Three raised mouse buttons: I love having 3 mouse buttons and the fact that they are raised above the adjacent surface to make them easier to depress. I absolutely hate the 2 recessed trackpoint button on my Dell D620; the ThinkPad buttons are perfect.
• Trackpoint: It is very configurable via the Thinkpad utility, so I can add options such as "tap to select"
• Touch Pad: the touch pad is very configurable; the extra options for scrolling, scroll continuation, and corner taps make the touchpad useful, but I still spend most of my time using the TrackPoint.
• Keyboard customization utility: This little utility allows keyboard remapping of both the internal and an external keyboard, so your can initiate the special Fn+F7 to toggle internal/external monitors and any other of the special Functions.
• Lenovo System Update Utility: Automatic updating of drivers and Lenovo software; much better than with any other manufacturer I've experienced.
• Build quality: This is one solid laptop. It's rigid, purposeful, and balanced
• Docking Station: It's great that there is a docking station available: fast docking for charging, mouse, and monitor.
• Easy to Upgrade: I upgraded to 2GB of DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) memory as soon as I unboxed my laptop. Instead of looking for service instructions, I decided to figure it out myself. I flipped over the T61 and each one of the screws that had to be removed to access the memory was labeled with a small icon. I unscrewed each one, the cover popped off, and the memory was right there.
  • 

Cons:

• Screen Blanking 6 Seconds after Logon: 6 seconds after I log on or unlock Windows Vista, the screen goes completely blank and then immediately comes back on. This closes the start menu (if I opened it during those first 6 seconds) and also resets the screen brightness to a default level, rather than the level I manually selected prior to the screen locking. This is annoying. Leave the display as it was. Switching back from the logon screen should be completely seamless and it isn't.
• Weird "Bouncing" Sound from Front Right of ThinkPad: About every 5 minutes or so, I hear a weird sound from the front right of the T61 where the hard drive is located. I pretty sure it's the hard drive. It sounds similar to a small wooden ball being dropped on a hard surface from about a 1/4-inch height. It's not loud, but it is persistent and annoying. I'd buy a different hard drive if I knew it would eliminate the sound. It's not the accelerometer detecting motion and parking the drive heads; I disabled that protection feature and the sound continue to occur.
• ThinkVantage password manager: It is supposed to allow fingerprint-protected automatic password entry of passwords on websites. But for WordPress, when I go to create a new post on my site, the password manager box pops-up for no apparent reason (that is not prompting for a password.) It seems best to leave password management to Firefox.
• Disk Keeper Slows Everything Down (w/default settings): It is automatically scheduled to defragment the hard drive, which kills the battery and slows the computer. This shouldn't be the default setting, it's best to disable this software and run it manually.
• No Auto-Wake on Lid Open: When I close the lid, Windows can be set to automatically go to sleep (although I have this feature disabled.) What I really want is for the ThinkPad to automatically wake-up when I open the like, the way a MacBook Pro does. Why else would I be opening the lid if I didn't want to use my computer? Why must I push the power button; can't it just turn on?
• No DVI-I port on the ThinkPad: There should be a DVI-I port on the ThinkPad instead of the VGA port. DVI-I supports both analog and digital signals, so a small dongle converts it to a standard VGA port. Plus a DVI-I port can drive a digital flat panel monitor (such as my Dell 3007WFP 30" monitor). Instead, I have to purchase a docking station just to connect to my external monitor. I would have purchased the docking station anyway, but I shouldn't be required to do so.
• Windows Vista stability and Issues: I initially had problems, but after I installed all of the updates and rebooted, there have been much fewer problems. Unfortunately, ShutterFly software and the ShutterFly Firefox plug-in both crash on Vista (not XP.) Also, the power save feature doesn't work properly — it's set to sleep after 10 minutes, but it stays on until the battery is dead. When the screen is deactivated due to the power save feature and it reactivated, it goes to a default brightness level, not the one I had manually set 20 seconds before the screen momentarily powered down.
• I ordered a CD burner instead of a DVD burner: I figured I'd save $50 and burn DVDs on my desktop PC if I needed to do so. But when I was burning 8 CDs to create the backup media, I knew I'd made a mistake. When I downloaded a 1 GB iso file that needed to be burned to a DVD, I was positive I made a mistake. I should have gotten the DVD+CD burner instead of the CD-only burner.

Other Application-specific thoughts:

I tried using Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook since they are the default Windows programs; I wanted to avoid additional installs. Outlook was unbearably slow syncing with my IMAP server. After an hour of frustration, I installed Thunderbird and all is well. I fared better with IE, but the lack of search-while-you-type finally broke my resolve, and I then installed Firefox. The customization and add-ons make Thunderbird and Firefox almost impossible to beat for anyone who is obsessive about details.

My favorite Windows Vista feature: Start Search. Press the Windows key, start typing the name of the application, and it is automatically selected. I still think Launchy is better, but I could live with only Start Search if I had to.

If you're like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking.  I decided to give it a try to see if I could at least get these domain names to pay for their own registration fees.

Looking at the example GoDoddy shows, it appeared that a domain would easily be able to pay for itself. With any luck, my domains should generate somewhere near this level of performance. Here is how GoDaddy is promoting the service:

Make money from your domains' parked pages! It's easy with CashParking. Whether you have one domain or a growing portfolio, CashParking can turn those domains into a cash generator!

I start by sitting-up a Cash Parking account. The cheapest account is $3.99 per month. I was a little surprised, because I figured if there was so much profit potential in Cash Parking, I wouldn't have to pay GoDaddy up-front to receive it. But what the heck, I'll give it a try anyway. I pay my $3.99 for a month and move over 14 domains.

After a 5 weeks, my results are terrible.

•  Number of Domains: 14
• Total Impressions: 90
• Total Clicks: 12
• Revenue: $0.99
• Customer Share of Revenue (minus monthly fee): -$3.00  (note: GoDaddy provides this stat in their Cash Parking promotional material, but not in their reports once you actually create an account.)
• Average RPM: $11.00  (Revenue per 1000 impressions)
• Average CTR: 13.33%  (Click Through Rate)
• Average CPC: $0.08  (Cost per Click for an Ad)

So, at the end of one year, I stand to make about $10 from cash parking, while paying GoDaddy  $47.88. Plus I still have to pay GoDaddy the annual registration fees for each domain name.

I don't think my lack of success is because of the domain names are terrible, because some of them are not. I would list the domain names here, but I'm not going to because 1.) I don't really endorse the content of the sites, and 2.) I'm paying GoDaddy $3.99 per month so they should be creating some traffic.

The lack of revenue is not because the domain names are brand new, because all of them have been parked at Godaddy.com for quite some time and GoDaddy has been making ad revenue from them for years and the pages are already in the search engines or where ever they should be by now.

I should state the at the monthly fee gives you Cash Parking for an unlimited number of domains, so the per-domain burden of the fee is higher the fewer domains you have. This program is really geared to having a large number of domains. But even if I did have a large number of domains, I still wouldn't made enough to cover the annual registration fees of each domain.

One last complaint is that 4 of the domain names were flagged as "adult". They clearly are not, in any way or permutation, adult-related domain names. But GoDaddy will not allow me to tailor the content to anything non-adult. Plus, there is no way for me to have them made "un-adult" and there is no explanation as to why they were tagged as adult in the first place.  The only way I can have ads on these sites is if I allow them to display adult content, which is not something I am willing to do. The domains were registered in response to GoDaddy charging me administrative fees for "maintaining my whois information."  Perhaps GoDaddy flagged them as adult so that they could only display adult ads and not ads that may conflict with their business model. They would not allow me to use the keyword "GoDaddy", so they are obviously looking after their own interest est in terms of content.

Conclusion

GoDaddy Cash Parking is a great way for GoDaddy to make more money from their existing customers. It's a great way for customers to pay GoDaddy more money. It is not a money making opportunity. Perhaps if you have a large number of high-profile domain names, if you are will to do a lot of work promoting the domain names, and perhaps if you are willing to display adult-themed content, you could make money using Cash Parking. But I couldn't and doubt the vast majority of GoDaddy customer could either.

I had my doubts about the scheme going in. It only cost me $4 to try it out, and now I know it's not for me. For a reason I can't fully put into words, the entire ordeal has lowered my opinion of GoDaddy. I've used them for years and I've put up with their relentless pitches for extra costly features each time you renew a domain. But something about this experience made me feel like I was been scammed. Perhaps it was the fact that some of my domains were forced to display adult ads or none at all. Perhaps it was the deceptive monthly reports that don't show I'm losing money. Whatever the reason, I plan cancel my Cash Parking account and I also plan to forward the domains to existing website, rather than allow GoDaddy to park my domain name and display a GoDaddy logo and lots of ads (from which no revenue is shared with me.)