Category Archives: Things that are Awesome

Dell e4300 is bittersweet.

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e4300

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

Absolutely terrific data analysis and visualization software.

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tableau_logo

Tableau…

A product manager pointed out this product when I was showing her our new MS Analytics (olap) implementation a couple weeks ago.

They have some great examples on their site of just how powerful this product is.  http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/examples

It is spendy, $1500 per named license + maintenance.

It’s primarily designed to go against Excel or table data, but it works with olap cubes as well, or at least somewhat.  Just enough to get you excited then you find out there’s a number of things you can’t do.  Hopefully this will be enhanced in a future version.

It works outstandingly well if your data is nice and pretty.  Normalized well.  Of course all of the sample data falls into that category.   It also works well against SQL, gain if your joins are easy to do.  It would be nice if they had a visual tool for creating joins.

Even so, I highly recommend it.

Some cool technology…

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I forget stuff.  So I go to great pains to take notes.  I use a multitude of technologies, including rude text files with reminders, to two wiki’s one personal and one for my department at work.

I’ve tried OneNote, and other fancy stuff, but the wiki’s by far work the best at least so far.

The last 24 hours have revealed two pretty cool technologies or apps I’d like to share with you.

First off Jott. 

Jott

It’s not new, just new to me and it works pretty well.

It’s beta as all Web 2.0 technologies are. You simply register your phone and create an account.   Based on caller ID it recognizes you.  You record a Jott, and it transcribes your voice to text and dispatches it.

It can send SMS, an email, post to a blog, do all kinds of good stuff.   Pretty slick and free.

So far I haven’t been able to get it to post to WordPress but it’s supposed to be able to do that.

The second part which is growing on me the more I play with it is:

Evernote

evernote

Another Web 2.0 product also in beta.  Though private beta at this time.  I have invites if you’re interested.  email me at datapoohbah (at) gmail (dot) com, or post a comment.

Evernote is similar to Microsoft OneNote.  Better in some areas, weaker in others.  It’s cross platform and has a great web interface.  With both Windows and Mac Clients that synchronize your notes so they are almost always available.  It has pretty slick search and tagging.  Doesn’t do attachments worth a crap, but this could potentially replace my Wiki’s…

Maybe not.  But I can have my Jotts’s create Evernotes, and that’s pretty cool.

If there is other cool stuff like this out there that you think I should look at, review or bash, please post a comment.

-DP

Uro-Club (I gotta Pee)

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So if you Golf, especially on those high class golf courses… This could really come in handy.

Initially it was reported that it drained through the bottom, but this appears to be where you store your filtered beer.

I’m not sure I’d want to do that, it looks kinda sharp to me…