The physical case is substantial and feels very solid. It doesn't feel like a toy.

The display is beautiful. It's 1024*600 which is big enough to be comfortable. But it means that vertical size is at a premium, which means that everyone's tendency to put their command bars at the top or bottom are problematic.

The Windows default location for the task bar is the bottom. I've moved it to the side. I also need to get IE to stop larding up its display with lots of extra bars at the top.

Generally, any time I get a new Windows machine I have to spend several hours setting things up and getting rid of cruft. There's a lot of that I need to do with Saten, but it won't be too tough to figure out because I'll just do all the same things I did for Alcyone, and I logged all of them here.

Things to do: Install Proximotron.

Install Zoom Player.

Install MPC-32.

Space is at a premium so I won't be installing Firefox.

Create a Quick Launch bar.

See if I can make Saten talk to Deneb (the WHS). (I can connect to Alcyone but not to Deneb. I think I know why, though. Please note that I am not yet asking for any suggestions or advice.)

It's an inherent problem with the form factor, but it's way too easy to make inputs you don't mean to. For instance, when the task bar was on the bottom, and I was doing input, my tasks kept vanishing. I finally realized that it was because I was wresting my right hand on the lower-right corner of the display, and there's a hotspot there that means "show windows screen" (i.e. minimize all tasks). That was another good reason for moving the taskbar to the left side.

Likewise, there are buttons on the outside of the bezel and when you pick up the item, it's easy to press those by mistake. First time I did that I got a bit freaked, but it was only the volume controls so it didn't matter.

The screen itself is particularly prone to that. I wanted to see how the camera app worked, so I opened it. There's a small camera on the front (for teleconferencing) and a better one on the back, for taking pictures. I tried using it to take pictures of the back yard, which required the camera to be held upright. To hold the camera with one hand so you can press the "take it" button with the other, naturally you want to hold the front and back of the machine -- but the front pressure point gets detected by the touch screen and it interprets it as an input. In this case it was outside of the frame of the camera app, which meant that it was treated as an input to Windows.

Press-and-hold means the same thing as "right mouse click", so it brought up a context menu. Another brief freakout.

To avoid that you have to balance the computer in your hand, but that drastically increases the chance of dropping it. I don't think I'll be using that camera much.

As to the touch screen, it is indeed possible to use your fingers, but in practice you have to use the special pen they provided. It's like the pen for my tablet: it has a button on the side, and it has a pressure-sensitive point, and it takes a battery. And there's no where to store it in the Slate's bezel.

The "folio", the carrying case, has a place for it, so it's not all bad.

More later.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 12:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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They just delivered it!

The box rattles a lot when moved; it doesn't seem to be packed very well. I hope it isn't DOA.

UPDATE: Getting through tthe initial Windows setup is a royal pain in the tail, because the touch screen keyboard simulation defaults to auto-repeat, and because hovering is treated as the same as clicking. My name is "Sttttteeeevvvee" no, it isn't. And every time I tried to backspace over the extra t's and e's, it would take my S out too. I think it took ten minutes for me to get it right.

This would have been fifty times easier if I had a USB keyboard, but I don't.

UPDATE: It's charging now and I'm not going to do anything until the battery is ready.

UPDATE:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 09:24 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Fedex says my Slate (eventually to be known as "Saten") is in Memphis and is going through customs right now. I'm feeling better and better about this.

There was a wonderful sequence of cartoons in Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin saw an offer of a free propeller beany on the back of one of his cereal boxes, and eventually mailed away for it. While he was waiting for it he had this ongoing fantasy of wearing it and flying like a helicoptor. Of course, the reality was a complete disappointment.

When I first ordered the Slate, I kept having images of just how neat and cool it would be. But as the weeks ground by and I began to wonder whether HP would ever ship it, that image faded. I've been trying to recapture that joy. But I'm not totally sure it's a good idea, lest I set myself up for the same fall Calvin took.

One of my things-to-do while I wait is to go through Railgun to see if I can find a decent image of Saten to use as a screen backdrop. There are a lot of images I can think of that I won't be using: I won't be using a picture of her hiking Uiharu's skirt. I won't use the bathhouse pictures from the OVA. I won't be using images from the swimsuit episode.

Even with the emphasis on the "decent", I'm sure I can find something suitable.

UPDATE: I got online into my checking account. I've got a debit card, and that's what I used to buy this. There's been a "hold" for $823 ever since late October when I originally ordered it. But as of this evening, they still haven't charged me. I wonder when they'll take their money?

UPDATE Tuesday: Fedex originally said it would deliver Thursday, but the tracking site says it's in a truck for delivery today!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 10:07 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The status update email I got from HP three weeks ago said that if they hadn't shipped my Slate 500 by December 27, they would cancel my order. Ten days and counting, and I no longer have any hope that they'll ship before that deadline.

The order status page continues to be a sick joke, saying each day that delivery is scheduled for that day, and shipment for two days previously. I have received no further communications, and any kind of news about it all is not to be found, at least by me.

So at this point the only real question is whether they really do cancel my order, or make it so I have a choice of doing so. If they do cancel, it leaves me to either give up, or to order again and go to the back of the shipment queue.

Merry Christmas to me, from the bastards at HP.

UPDATE: I reread their email and it said:

If we do not hear from you and we have not shipped the specified products prior to 12/27/2010, your order will be cancelled with a full refund.

So I responded to it and told them I didn't want my order being cancelled. I wonder if that will make any difference.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 02:55 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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So I went out today with Uiharu to see how wifi works in the wild.

First part of the experiment was to see how far away from my apartment I could go and still see Railgun, my hub. And the answer is, "Not very far at all." About 30 yards away from my front door, the signal was down to 2 out of 4 bars. By the next corner in our apartment, about 70 yards away, I couldn't see it at all. The school is even further than that, so I can only conclude that nearly all the hubs I can see are neighbors, which means this really is a big nerd cluster.

The second part of the experiment was to visit the coffee shop. It used to be part of a chain called "Coffee People" which was in competition with Starbucks. Starbucks eventually acquired Coffee People.

But the combination would have left Starbucks with five stores in about a 1 mile area, including three at one intersection. That was too many, so they cut this particular store loose. The owner didn't want to shut down, so now he runs it as an independent, called "Java Nation".

Starbucks had wifi, but it was pay-for-use. So the owner of Java Nation put in a wifi hub, only his is free. And that's where I went today, to see if I could get Uiharu to connect to it.

And I could. Most of the way, anyway. I had internet connectivity, but no DNS. I wasn't able to access any web site by URL, but I happened to have the IP of J Greely's site in the IE history, and that worked.

I don't know why DNS didn't work. I spent a bunch of time trolling through every menu I could find in Uiharu and didn't find anything that would allow me to set up a DNS manually or to control automatic download of it, so...

Regardless, when I got back home again I tried connecting to Railgun and that still failed.

One hint, one tiny hint, just maybe: the password I set up for Railgun is 8 characters long. But when I go back through the connection entry for Railgun and get to that field, it displays as asterisks (good) but there are 13 of them. Does that mean anything? 8 characters is supposed to be enough, but maybe I should use something longer, just to make sure.

But I couldn't connect even when Railgun was set up to be open, so I doubt that makes any difference. Sigh.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 01:59 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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It looks like HP has finally started shipping the Slate 500.

HP's "order status" web page continues to be utterly useless, incrementing the "delivery" date field by one day per elapsed day, so that it always shows today's date.

My order was #998. I wonder when they'll get to me? I wonder if I'll be given any warning before it arrives? At the rate things have been going, I won't be the least bit surprised if UPS shows up with it unexpectedly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 10:06 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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This afternoon I had a weird thought: what happens if the ethernet cable from my other hub plugs into Netgear's "LAN" instead of its "WAN"?

The answer is that it works perfectly. I didn't even need a criss-cross cable to do it. One or the other is sensing and doing a resex automatically.

Right now Alcyone, my big computer, is plugged intoo the Netgear hub, which is plugged into the SMG hub, and I am posting this through it. Everything works perfectly using wires. I can also open Deneb and retrieve files from it, which is Microsoft's networking rather than TCP/IP.

Alcyone got its IP from Deneb's DHCP, too. So this means the Netgear hub is now a full participant in my wired network. So now to enable wireless, and see what happens.

UPDATE: This update is being made through Arcturus, my older computer which usually runs torrents, via wireless. (Its ethernet cable is unplugged.)

Unfortunately, I can't get Uiharu, my iPaq, to connect to it. It fails at the end and gives me an entirely unenlightening error message:

"Warning: Cannot connect to the network. Check your network and service provider settings and try again."

Thanks for the sour persimmons, buster.

UPDATE:

Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty strong signal.

I don't really understand what the problem is with Uiharu. It sees enough of the hub to be able to tell what kind of security settings I chose. The Netgear documentation recommended making it an unsecured network for initial testing, and even that didn't work.

It may be a matter of experimenting with the network settings, to figure out a set that Uiharu understands. Choices:

SSID: Railgun

Region: North America (only choice)

Mode: a only
      b only
      g only
      g and b ***
      11ng
      11na

Channel: 11 - 2.462GHz (hard set)

when I let it autoconfigure the channel, initially it chose 11, but later it switched to channel 8, which you're not supposed to use. So I went in and manually forced channel 11.

Whireless security choices are: None, WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA and WPA2. I have it set to WPA2.

WPA with: PSK, Radius. Damned if I know what this does, but it defaulted to PSK and I left it that way.

Alright, let's try it again temporarily with "none", to see if that helps.

UPDATE: No, nothing I try makes any difference. Some settings make Uiharu lock up during network discovery, however.

There's a free-access Wifi near me, and sometime when the rain lifts, I'll go over there and give it a try.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 04:42 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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1   I have heard from a coworker that it is increasingly common for at least one end of your network link to be able to automatically detect the wires are backwards(/not crossover) and deal with it. I was surprised too, but recently after spending five minutes looking for the crossover I gave up and just plugged a normal cable between my computers, and lo, it worked perfectly. (Was doing a brain transplant between an old and a new laptop and that was the fastest transfer I had. Gb is way faster than the hard drives, anyhow.)

(I work at a networking company, I'd say you have no idea how hard it has been to honor the "no advice" rule on your last post except as an engineer too you probably have a very good idea. )

Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at November 30, 2010 05:23 PM (/EDjr)

2

Well, nothing I seem to be able to do will get Uiharu to connect, so I'm even open to advice on that.

When I had the hub set to g/n, Uiharu hung during the network hunt stage.

I have never actually connected to Wifi with Uiharu. There's a coffee shop near here which has free Wifi, and I ought to go over there and see if it will work.

Anyway, I was able to connect to Railgun using Arcturus, so that means Railgun itself is set up properly. (At least properly enough for my needs.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 30, 2010 05:45 PM (+rSRq)

3

Thought I'd give you a cast shot:

On the far left is Alcyone, an ASUS G72GX. Behind it is Regulus, a Cobalt Qube 3.

Next is Railgun, the Netgear SRXN3205 I just got working. Arcturus is the Compaq Presario V2000. (Which is long since obsolete, but it works for what I'm using it for.)

Uiharu, in front, is an iPaq 210. And on the far right is Deneb, an Acer NAS running Windows Home Server.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 30, 2010 06:05 PM (+rSRq)

4 PSK (pre-shared key) is the correct setting unless you run a corporate wireless setup with multiple access points and a separate authentication server. Radius is the protocol that glues the access points to some repository of usernames/passwords or certificates.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at November 30, 2010 06:10 PM (fpXGN)

5 So, you want DHCP from Deneb. You don't mention shutting off the DHCP in the new hub that I can see, which is probably on by default. It seems like getting two different DHCP answers might confuse the poor thing, whereas your computer might happen to behave in a way that works (which could be either by sheer coincidence or possibly by design; there are ways to work out you got a bogus address and reject it and it turns out to be a practical ability, and I wouldn't be surprised the iPaq doesn't do that). To further diagnose this, you might try unplugging everything else from the wireless and see if you can convince Uiharu to see the admin page for the wireless device.

I'll cop to this being a bit of a stab in the dark but it's the only thing I've come up with that seems to match all the symptoms. Your setup ought to work.

(Oh, and a bit of Googling around for another theory revealed that there are Wifi updateds for the iPaq, you might want to make sure you've got the latest.)

Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at November 30, 2010 08:45 PM (/EDjr)

6 Wifi is black magic as far as I'm concerned. I have an HP printer with WiFi, and it took me three days of tech support calls to get it working. It basically amounted to "Yes, you entered all the correct settings. They didn't work, run the process again with those exact same settings. Repeat until all the stars align and it actually works." When I got a new router and changed my wifi settings to WPA and such, I made a couple of attempts to get the printer on the new network and then just gave up and ran cable.

On your specific issues, from the sound of things your device has three separate network adapters (WAN, LAN, wifi) and all three are going to have their own settings, and then there are going to be settings for how traffic is routed and translated between them. I'd (cringe) recommend that you work you way from easiest to hardest, eg get the LAN working, then WiFi, then WAN if you need to. It sounds like you have the LAN working, but in your place I'd go play with the admin pages and see if they have anything that lets you monitor traffic and alerts in which case you might see anything funny. And if you do, that will give you clues on the WiFi side.

Posted by: David at November 30, 2010 09:40 PM (rj+nH)

7 Why are you (we?) not supposed to use channel 8?

Posted by: gaiaswill at November 30, 2010 09:59 PM (7QHNK)

8

Because you're "playing in the cracks". Wifi is using Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum, which is why so many different devices can use the same frequency.

Each unit looks like background noise to all the others. A unit which straddles two bands like that is causing interference for twice as many other hubs. It's bad citizenship.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 30, 2010 11:59 PM (+rSRq)

9

Jeremy, yes, I have DHCP (and NAT) shut off in the Netgear hub.

Oh, and a bit of Googling around for another theory revealed that there are Wifi updateds for the iPaq, you might want to make sure you've got the latest.

I'd love to, but I've never successfully made contact with Microsoft's update server. When I use the USB networking, I can web browse to this site, but trying to use the Update tool in the settings panel always fails. Part of why I wanted to get a Wifi hub was in hopes that the iPaq would be able to use it  to get updates -- but unless I can do that from the coffee shop, it looks like I'm deadlocked.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 01, 2010 12:05 AM (+rSRq)

10 Actually, I'm wrong. Looks like I can download that patch and install it through the USB. I'll give it a shot.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 01, 2010 12:07 AM (+rSRq)

11

Hmmm. Actually, I already had downloaded and installed it. I just tried installing it again, and now I'll see if it helps.

I think last time I installed it onto the CF, and I think that was a mistake. This time it's installed in internal memory.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 01, 2010 12:10 AM (+rSRq)

12 Rats. No difference whatever.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 01, 2010 12:12 AM (+rSRq)

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Mucking around with TCP/IP always makes my head hurt.

I made space for the Netgear hub on my computer table. Before I can even think of trying to mess around with Wifi, though, I have to make it see my LAN.

It's got four ethernet connectors labeled "LAN" and one labeled "WAN". The WAN connector is supposed to go to my cable modem, and if I was going to use it in router/firewall mode, that's what I would do, I guess. But for the time being I don't want to mess with that.

So my bright idea was to connect its WAN plug to my existing ethernet hub.

In order to set it up, there needs to be a computer connected to one of its LAN connectors, and I was using Alcyone (the ASUS computer) to do that. The Netgear box defaults to 192.168.1.1 and its NAT defaults to a bank of IPs in the 192.168.1.* range. All pretty standard.

Because of some confusion, since resolved, when I got Deneb (the WHS NAS) I reset my entire LAN to use IPs in 169.254.1.*. So Regulus (the Qube) is hardwired to be 169.254.1.1 and Deneb (the WHS) is hardwired to  be 169.254.1.2.

I decided the netgear hub (not yet named, but eventually to be "Railgun") should be 169.254.1.3 and 169.254.1.4, and managed to get that set up.

But nothing I've tried has made it so that the netgear box can see my LAN or see the internet. Nada.

I'm tired of screwing with it right now. I'll give it another shot tomorrow.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 07:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Looks like I should be using channel 11, donchathink?

This apartment complex is next door to a high school, and I suspect that's where most of these are. It'll be interesting to compare signal strength of my Wifi hub (arriving Monday, working whoknowswhen) which will be about 2 feet from my computer to these others which are mumble distance away. How strong is point-blank?

There was one I saw briefly which was on channel 11, but it was at -94 dB and dropped into the mud almost immediately. If I left this thing running all night I might see it again, but in any case it obviously doesn't represent an interference threat.

I'm also disappointed that the one I saw a few times which was named "NETGEAR" isn't in there. It's possible that one does belong to a neighbor who doesn't leave it running all the time.

On another note: I'm appalled at how many of these are using WEP, which has long since been cracked. One of the things I'll be doing is making sure that mine is set to use WPA2 instead.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 09:02 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
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I'm not just frustrated because I don't yet have my Slate 500. I'm even more frustrated because I don't have the slightest idea when I'll get it. The HP order page for my order is completely useless, continuing its pattern of updating the delivery date one day per day, always saying today's date.

There seems to be a lot of excitement out there for this fundamental form factor. Several major companies are talking about releasing tablets of various sizes and characteristics. What they all seem to have in common, though, is that they run upgraded phone operating systems. Android seems to be a popular choice. The iPad runs the same fundamental OS as the iPhone. And the buzz about HP is that their main choice for this would be WebOS, the lineal descendant of the Palm OS which they gained when they bought out Palm.

I don't understand that. I have owned PDA's before. I used to own a clamshell I bought from HP, which ran WinCE but used some sort of esoteric processor, and I have two main memories of it: first, that it was awesome and the built-in software worked really well (including a cut-down version of Office) and second, that finding apps for it was frustrating as all hell. They had to be developed specifically for WinCE and they had to be compiled for the specific Toshiba processor I was using. (Fortunately for me, the built-in apps were sufficient for my needs.)

That unit was amazing; it fit easily in my pocket, but when opened the top part featured a 640*200 display with a touch screen, and the bottom part had a mini-QWERTY keyboard. With my big fingers I couldn't touch-type, but I could four-finger quite reasonably.

One of the biggest reasons I was so hyped by the Slate 500 is because it runs Windows 7. Maybe it's not the best operating system in the world. Maybe making it run on that form factor is a problem. But, there's all that wonderful software out there which runs on it, including all the standard apps which I use on all my other Windows machines. And for me, at least, that easy and rich availability of apps is the biggest point in its favor.

I don't want Android. Maybe it's cooler than next week's snow storm. Maybe it's hotter than AGW. But it's still a custom execution environment, and I've already been there.

In fact I've been there as recently as last February. The iPaq is another one, and it took me a long time to figure out where and how to buy apps, and there just aren't that many out there that interest me. (I ended up buying about five games, but the only ones I ever play are an iPaq version of Minesweeper and an iPaq version of Mah Jong solitaire.)

Compatibility with Windows is a huge selling point for me, but apparently HP thinks it's a net negative. One reason they may have ordered a small initial production run for the Slate 500 (rumored) is that they really didn't want to release it with Windows, and wanted to wait until they could release fundamentally the same hardware but with WebOS on it. Bleah. (Yeah, they have to pay per-copy for Windows and WebOS they own, but that's their problem, not mine.)

The proprietary execution environment, combined with Apple's iron grip on app sales, is the main reason I would never consider buying an iPad. Android is a little better, because there's no Android equivalent to Apple's monopoly online store, but it's still a proprietary execution environment, a new one, with little support.

Windows solves that problem, but I seem to be the only person who thinks it's important.

It sure doesn't seem like HP does, though. They say that a sure sign that a studio thinks a movie is awful is that they don't schedule prescreenings of the film for big name reviewers. In the tech industry, a good indication that a company isn't enthusiastic about a high tech consumer product is that they don't release any to major tech magazines for review -- and that seems to be the case for the Slate 500. The only tech reviewer that I've found talking about seeing and trying a real unit was this one.

But it wasn't HP that let him use it. It was the Israeli company that developed the touch pad, and the unit he saw was an engineering proto, not even pilot build. The touch pad, apparently, is a step ahead: it can detect multi-touch, and it is pressure sensitive. So that company is proud of the unit and wants the press to see it.

Unlike HP.

One of the rumors was that shipment was shut down because they had discovered a major bug which could cause the unit to lock up completely, requiring a reset. If so, then maybe the reason they haven't loaned any units to any reviewers is because they feared the result if the units did lock up that way. And I can't really blame them.

If it's an intransigent bug, finding and fixing it could really be  time-consuming. I know that all too well, from personal experience. But I also know that leaving customers (and potential customers) dangling in the breeze, with no solid information at all, is terrible business practice.

Maybe they're working their butts off to try to ship these as soon as they reasonably can. Or maybe they just don't give a damn.

The "back order" announcement doesn't explain everything. If, as the rumor said, they built 5000 units and received 9000 orders, well, then there should be 5000 happy customers out there who received theirs -- or a hundred, or at least a few. A handful of the 5000 units should have ended up with magazines for review.

The fact that, as far as I can tell, not a single unit has shipped, means there's something deeper going on, which is why I'm coming to believe the "last minute fatal bug" explanation. If anyone out there has received their Slate 500, they haven't posted anything about it online that I've found using major search engines.

It's increasingly hard for me to ignore the "they don't give a damn" theory. (Which isn't mutually exclusive with the "fatal bug" theory.)

No matter what the issues are, HP's utter silence regarding the situation is intolerable.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 08:25 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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