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But they’ve won an Apple Design Award.  I find that interesting, considering it’s not even a product yet.  It’s vaporware as far as I’m concerned.  Until it’s out in the wild, it’s nothing.

The “new” features they are touting with DL2 have existed in the Pedias for a while.  I made the switch a few months back when it was obvious DL2 wasn’t going to ship on time, if ever.

• Let’s see, it’s code new barcode scanning.  Yippee.  So do the Pedias.
• It has the ability to store items as files.  The Pedias have had that for a while.
• HTML export.  What?  Really?  Finally.  It’s about time they caught up with the year 2000.  The Pedias have this, and it’s simple to customize.
• It has .Mac integration.  Great, for the 6 people who actually use both .Mac and DL2.
• Um, that’s about it

So, really, what’s “new” in DL2?  Nothing!  Nothing because it’s still not released.  And nothing because the “new” features have existed in a competing product for quite some time.  DL2 might be more lickable, but it’s less functional…and you still can’t buy it anyway.

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• Movie rentals
• We expected these, and his Steveness delivered.  Unfortunately it’s almost as bad as everything else out there.  What we got was a mix of pricing, $2.99, $3.99, and $4.99.  That’s for catalog, new release, and HD movies.  That’s very disappointing.  The beauty of iTunes is that it’s 99 cents for every song (that is until they introduced the DRM-free stuff.)
• There is a 24-hour watch limitation.  That sucks too.  We already have that horrible limitation with the Microsoft DRMs out there.  What’s the purpose of a 24-hour limitation?  Let’s say I have an Apple TV, my laptop, and an iPod.  I want the option to watch on each, which I will have.  But there is no guarantee I will be able to watch within a 24-hour artificial window.  I am regularly on the road for work and sometimes it’s just not possible.

• New iPod touch software
• It’s $20!  WTF?  Since when did Apple start charging for these types of upgrades?  It should be free for iPod Touch early adopters.  The only reasonbly significant addition is Mail.  That’s really for of an omission from the first release than a “new” feature for the second.  Come on, Apple, do the right thing.  Reward your loyal early adopters with software that should have been in the first release.

• Time Capsule
• This is cool.  I like it.  My only question is, can I use my current Airport Extreme base station with my own external drive and finally have it work with Time Machine?  Is there a software update that makes this possible?
• Apple’s page for Which Wireless Are You?  seems to indicate I can’t use my current base station with Time Machine.  If that’s the case, then screw you, Apple.  You promised it would work in Leopard and had it in release candidates.

• MacBook Air
• This is maybe the biggest “oh well” of the lot.  It’s thin, sure.  But it’s too big.  Yes, too big.
• Thin is nice, but 13.3″ still makes it “huge” compared to what it could be.
• Why no SSD standard?  I realize there is a cost associated with SSD, but Dell sells a notebook with a 32GB SSD for $1600.  Apple could do the same.
• Why not do something truly innovative and use a small SSD combined with some NAND flash for storage?  That would have driven costs down.  Limit the SSD to, say, 8GB, and utilize the NAND for storage as in iPods.
• Battery life is a HUGE disappointment.  5 hours?  Big deal!  I get that on my 15.4″ MacBook Pro
• Let me get this straight, less battery, slower CPU, slower HDD, ugly and fat bezel.  Fantastic.  I see no tremendous advantage.  The new touchpad is cool, but not that cool.  Thin is cool, but not without everything else.  I need more power, I need smaller, I need solid state.  Without that, it’s just another MacBook without an optical.

• Apple TV
• This, I liked.  Simply a free software upgrade with some much missed features.  Frankly, these were features that should have been in the first version.  And it’s free.  You hear that, Apple?  Free.  Not like the iPod Touch missing features which cost $20.
• Price drop.  Not only is the update free, the cost of the product went down.  Sounds good to me!  Sign me up!

Overall, not too happy or excited with this Macworld.  I expected movie rentals to be innovative.  They aren’t.  I expected the Macbook Air to be innovative.  It’s not.  I didn’t expect Apple to charge for a simple software upgrade of missing features.  They did.

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I got it the week Leopard was released.  I was simply waiting for the new OS to buy.

Mini-Review:

I love it!  It get fantastic battery life (4-5 hours).  It’s got loads of processing power.  It’s Intel so I run WINE on it and can run a lot of Windows programs pretty darn well.  I run Internet Explorer to access my company’s web-client.  It runs an ActiveX control and it works nearly flawlessly.

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Hundreds of bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, some of it almost 100 years old, may be unceremoniously poured down a drain because authorities suspect it was being sold by someone without a license.

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The latest gives tips on how to learn a language quickly.

I also like How to lose 20lbs of fat in 30 days.  I am going to try out both ideas.  I also ordered his book so I’m looking forward to reading that.

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I am pretty sure the hard drive has physical issues that aren’t helping the problems any. It refused to boot one day so IT took a look at it and, of course, IT immediately blamed all the software I had installed on it. I told them I would remove it all but my productivity would literally be cut in half. I can’t be crippled by the meager choice of shitty software they install. Hell, their software choices are most of the performance/stability issues. IE regularly craps out, as does Office. Forget trying to use SalesLogix or any of our bug tracking tools. They take at least 10 minutes simply to start up!

I am not exaggerating when I say that after initial boot, with no additional programs opened, over 500MB of RAM is already in use! WTF?

To get them off my back I decided I’d come up with a clever way around their limitations. First, I uninstalled all the stuff I had installed. Ultimately IT is going to re-image my laptop, which is fine by me. I don’t store anything on there that can’t be lost. Then, I implemented my master plan.

I wanted a simple solution with a couple goals:
1) Touch IT’s image as little as possible (none is ideal)
2) Run whatever programs I choose/need to
3) Hide it from IT’s prying eyes and auditing software
4) Make it as simple as possible
5) Must be free

I thought of a couple ideas. I had been using PortableApps. This works well, is portable, and I can hide those apps from IT. The main problem is that I can’t install just any old app. I was running it locally rather than from a USB stick since I didn’t need or care if it was actually portable. As such, with no need for portability I decided it was a weak solution because of the limited number of apps.

Even before I tried to find a solution I needed a way to hide everything from IT’s prying eyes. I chose a combination of tools to hide my nefarious activities from IT. In reality, none of it is nefarious. Most of it I use for work purposes on a regular basis. That which may not be “work” related are things like iTunes. I most certainly use it while I’m working and traveling though, so I feel like it’s work related enough.

We already use TrueCrypt for an external drive we carry. We encrypt a partition that contains software and tools that are needed for our demo systems. The idea is that if we lose the drive or it gets stolen that it can’t be compromised. It works quite well for this purpose. But it has a neat feature I exploit to meet my particular needs.

TrueCrypt has the ability to mount a file as a volume. Further, this can be dynamically sized. That means I can make a volume of 10GB (or whatever) that only takes up the actual physical space of the data it contains. While their documentation says this has a performance hit I haven’t experienced anything noticeable or that would prevent me from continuing use in this manor.

With all my personal stuff encrypted, IT can’t see it. Their auditing software is mostly useless for my personal stuff, which is how I want it.

I like the idea of running the volume right on the laptop’s drive. This eliminates the need for anything external like a USB drive or external hard drive, things that can get lost or are cumbersome. I just create a volume on my laptop’s internal drive and have at it. Works for me.

I was using this solution with PortableApps actually. I had my PortableApps volume that contained this, that, and the other thing. For the reasons stated above, it didn’t work ideally for me. But the encrypted volume idea I carried over to the solution I use now.

MojoPac. It’s now free for personal use (I’m not arguing semantics, I don’t use it for work even though it’s on my work laptop). Again, MojoPac is like PortableApps in that it’s meant to be portable. The difference is that it’s designed to install just about any old Windows app.

But, really, it has a much cooler use for me. I installed it on its own encrypted volume. I made it a 10GB dynamic. Right now, with the apps I have on it, it takes up about 2GB of disk space. I have no need to take it with me on a USB stick. I run OS X at home so it’s about as useful as a screen door on a battleship.

This gives me the ability to run MojoPac and my normal desktop at the same time and switch back and forth between the two. This also gives me the ability to run pretty much any app. IT can’t see it. I don’t touch IT’s setup at all. I think it’s pretty simple. And it’s free. It meets my criteria. It also makes for a very clean “work” desktop which is good when I have customers looking over my shoulder at a Visio or PowerPoint or something.

I ended up tweaking it quite a bit to make it easy and convenient for me to use. The way MojoPac works is that it hides the hard drive of the host PC. This didn’t work so well for me as there are documents I’d like to share back and forth easily. Now, the host PC can see the MojoPac drive, and that’s all well and good. But since I will spend most of my time in MojoPac I wanted access to my main drive.

The solution is a little used feature of NTFS called junctions. Basically they are similar to symlinks in *nix. I love symlinks for all kinds of reasons. Back in my Linux days I made extensive use of them. One of my favorite, simple backup/snapshot utilities, rsnapshot, makes heavy use of symlinks. It’s a great filesystem feature.

I use NTFS Link Shell Extension to make this super simple. Right-click, select the link source, right-click and drop a junction. Simple, like yer mom.

I’ve actually got iTunes installed on MojoPac, but the database and songs exist on an unencrypted folder on my “normal” install. I don’t need or want the music to be encrypted and want access to the files at least even if MojoPac isn’t running. I don’t have iTunes installed on the IT virgin system so all is well.

I have created a junction to the main C drive as well. Further, I store a lot of things on my desktop, both on the IT virgin and in MojoPac. I made a junction on my MojoPac desktop right to my IT virgin desktop. I can easily move/open/copy/etc documents between the two.

With this basic combination the possibilities are wide open. I think if I ran XP at home I would actually do something like this for my main install. I might not encrypt it, but I would run MojoPac and install only there, keeping my main install a virgin.

I kind of wonder how MojoPac would work on OS X with CrossOver. Or if it would work at all. I think not, too OS dependent, but I plan on buying a new MacBook Pro really soon and will try it out. That would be freaking sweet if I could tweak the thing to do that.

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