Ben Galbraith’s Blog

As I promised earlier, I’m back to review the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.

The 4000 is the latest in Microsoft’s line of ergonomic keyboards targeted at computer professionals which includes the formerly quite popular Microsoft Natural Elite and Microsoft Natural Pro keyboards, the latter having been my favorite keyboard for a very long time.

Since the Natural Pro has been discontinued for many years, I’ve been searching for worthy successor from Microsoft (as I’m getting tired of buying them on eBay whenever I need a new one). Did I find it in the 4000? Nope.

The 4000 is generally well-designed, sporting essentially the same width as the Natural Pro and correcting a few of its flaws (such as having a wider spacing between the left- and right-hand key groups and replacing the Natural Pro’s “ridged” keys with flat versions, as shown in the image below).

However, the 4000 fails in three key aspects:

• Key resistance. Like the Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 I reviewed last time, the 4000 has a very unsatisfying “mushy” response to a key press. This results in occasional lost keystrokes and generally requires more effort to type than the pro. Bleah.
• No “Next / Previous Track” buttons. I use these all the time on the Natural Pro.
• No USB ports. The Natural Pro has a built-in two port USB 1.1 hub, and I really miss not having this in other keyboards. A built-in two port USB 2.0 hub would have been fantastic.

If not for the key resistance problem, I could probably live with this keyboard and just re-assign one of its five user-programmable keys (in fact, all the keys are user-programmable). But, with all its flaws together, I’ll have to stick with the Natural Pro for another year.

UPDATE: iMovie ‘08 now supports AVCHD.

Just in time for the holidays, our old JVC miniDV camcorder broke. We used it just a handful of times in the years since we purchased it, but we’re convinced that now we’re finally ready to start recording all those home movies that friends and relatives love to watch.

As we pondered a replacement, I noticed that Amazon is selling Sony’s new HDR-UX1 HD camcorder for an amazing 44% off: $850, a steep discount off the $1,500 retail price.

Wow. I did some research and found that this camera uses the brand-new AVCHD file format, currently unsupported by nearly every application on every platform. Only a couple of Windows programs — Sony’s viewer and PowerDVD 7 — can even play it back. However, the camera doubles as an SD camcorder — but recording in an MPEG2 format that’s also not compatible with iMovie. And, iMovie and other Mac programs can’t use the camcorder for video input like they can with miniDV. Hmm…

We took the leap and bought it. The quality of the HD video recorded by this device is astounding. I’m not a videophile, but it seems to rival equipment in the $3,000 range. However, using the HD video footage on the Mac is painful. You currently have to down-size it to SD sizes through a multi-step process (down-convert to MPEG2 on the PC using Sony’s tools, convert to DV format using the free MPEG Streamclip on the Mac, import into iMovie manually), but we’ve found that the quality of the final product in iMovie is just as good as any other DV / SD device (some find Sony’s downsizing algorithm too crude for their tastes). Of course, you can skip HD entirely and just record in SD with the device, but you still have to convert the output files using MPEG Streamclip for iMovie to use them (and Final Cut, too).

Since AVCHD is just H.264 in a different format than Quicktime’s H.264 movies, and given its use by both Sony and Panasonic, I’m hoping support for AVCHD by Apple is just around the corner. Regardless, I’m sure as AVCHD devices gain more traction in the marketplace, an easy workflow that converts this stuff to HDV footage for use with iMovie (as opposed to down-converting it to SD res) is around the corner. In fact, some folks report already doing it by a combination of custom C code and command-line video file format converters.

So the pain of the current editing process notwithstanding, we’re very happy with the HDR-UX1 and have given it quite a workout over the holiday season. It’s twin, the SD1, has a built-in hard-drive, but it goes for something like $1,400 on Amazon.

The machine on which I installed Vista has an SATA RAID 1 array managed by my Intel motherboard’s on-board SATA controller. Unfortunately, the motherboard (a D865PERL) is based on the 865PE chipset, which uses the 82801ER (ICH5R) I/O controller hub for the RAID array, and the ICH5R’s RAID drivers don’t officially support Vista (the next-gen ICH6R does have RAID drivers for Vista).

Fortunately, the last ICH5R-compatible version of Intel’s RAID driver (Intel Matrix Storage Manager 5.5) does work with Vista. Or at least, it works for me. I grabbed the “Floppy Configuration Utility - Intel Matrix Storage Manager” download from Intel’s site, imaged a 3.5″ disk, inserted it during the Vista install, and it’s worked like a champ.

I’m blogging this for posterity as I didn’t find a lot of information when I Googled about this stuff.

UPDATE: Using this driver caused my system to blue-screen two or three times a day. Vista mis-reported the issue to me as a video driver problem, so I didn’t put two and two together. Use this driver at your peril; I’m reverting back to a non-Vista OS on the affected machine as Intel continues to state that the IC5HR is unsupported on Vista.

I recently installed Vista Enterprise RTM on a system I built a few years back. Vista failed to recognize my Linksys PCI Wireless card and my motherboard’s AC-97 audio chipset, but when I ran Windows Update it automatically downloaded the drivers, installed them, and rebooted.

Oh wait. It didn’t reboot. The hardware… just started working. Sixteen years of rebooting after every single update, trivial or otherwise, have finally come to an end. Yay!

When I first started speaking to audiences on the NFJS tour a few years back, I presented on RELAX NG — the world’s only comprehensive and sane XML schema language. At the time, I spoke to audiences that nearly universally had never heard of it and some subset of whom either quietly or rather vocally considered me stupid, crazed, or simply naive for considering it a viable option.

I admit, back at the height of XML Schema’s popularity, I was perhaps tilting a bit at the windmills. Don Box told me in a group setting essentially, “If I could wave a magic wand and make us all use RELAX NG, I would, but XML Schema won. Get over it.”

And now, it appears the tide is turning. I couldn’t be happier. Though I want back all the wasted time and effort XML Schema foisted upon us.

(My old RELAX NG slidedeck is here; I think this dates back to 2004).

Every now and again, I find myself working from behind a firewall and fall back to using Gmail. When I do, I BCC myself on all messages I send (because my POP3 server receives all email and its archived from there and Gmail is just a backup).

I noticed one day that because someone had started addressing me as “‘JavaMan’ <ben@…>” that Gmail decided that my new name was in fact ‘JavaMan’ and whenever I CC’d or BCC’d myself on email, it would use that alias. BCC doesn’t matter, but for CC’ing, it’s actually a pretty embarrassing moniker to start sending around.

I played around with it a bit, and, sure enough, you can override the names associated with any Gmail contacts by simply sending someone an email with the email address given a new name (like ‘ILovePresidentBush’ <yourfriend@gmail.com>).

Of course, I don’t imagine folks are addressing themselves via CC or BCC that often from Gmail, but if your new name for your friend sneaks by just one time…

Update: Matt Raible commented saying, essentially, “Any email client lets you change the name associated with an email address — just change the value in quotes.” Let me be clearer: Gmail lets you change the name associated with an email address in someone else’s address book permanently (until that someone else changes it to some other value, or someone else changes it). In my case, I didn’t change my own name in my address book to “JavaMan”, but because someone else sent me an email calling me JavaMan, now its changed in my address book.