Getting an iPad Air

A bit more than three years ago I bought an iPad (Generation 1 from today's point of view). 64GB, Wifi only.
There were good reason to stay on Wifi only, because I intended to use the iPad mainly at home and not as a "large" phone to carry around.

My iPad came to be a real companion at home...

• first email and news check in the morning - on the iPad
• last check in the evening/night - on the iPad
• second screen while watching TV - the iPad
• checking news (feedly), email, facebook, twitter in between - the iPad

It did not want to use it while commuting to the office, because I know that I'm an online junkie and that I'd be online all the time on the train/underground. In urgent cases I could still tether through my Android phone.

However, the performance and stability of the iPad deteriorated... or rather: began to suck.
For example. when entering a new appointment in the calendar app, the lag when trying to select the time was a couple of seconds (!). Feedly, Pocket, Facebook would crash, i.e. just exit, several times a day.
This really started with iOS 5.1... And since this is an Generation 1 iPad there is no upgrade path to iOS 6 or 7.

So, as much as I love my iPad I also started to hate it.
I used to work a lot (while at Sun Microsystems) with Thin Clients (specifically the SunRay) and loved the notion of a client device, that would not age. Meaning that the capacity in the client (CPU, memory, screen estate, ...) would suffice for all IT trends for say 7-10 years.

In a way the iPad started as a thin client, and - call me naïve - I expected an iPad to last 4-5 years.
It did not. Not even three years and it got obsolete (for my usage pattern).
That's a PC replacement cycle, not a thin client cycle.

So over the last couple of months I was actually considering switching to a Nexus 7. But then I decided to stay in both worlds, Android on my phone, iOS on my tablet.

Yesterday I ordered my iPad Air... to get back stability and speed. Still Wifi only.
The old iPad will probably stay around as a TV/raspbmc remote...

Update for eCard configuration for Oracle's Sun Ray

There's an update for the new Austrian eCards for the Sun Ray[1] Server... the 2010 card... you know, the one that does NOT work properly as a citizen card.

The update can be found and downloaded here on the Sun Ray User Group wiki.


--
[1] yes, they are called the Oracle's Sun Ray Clients now.

24 bit RDP under Windows XP

Just recently during (probably my last) Sunray/VDI demo installation I ran into the problem that we could not get 24bit color depth on the virtualized Windows XPs.

The SunRay part of the installation (i.e. the Desktop Unit (DTU, aka. ThinClient) itself could not be the problem, because they always are 24bit (incl their respective X session on the SunRay Server),
we also ran the RDP client (uttsc) with the -A 24 option to force it to 24bit (which it would default to anyway) ... but to no avail.

Of course as always google is your friend; several people have posted and blogged this already: under Windows XP you have to explicitely enable 24bit for RDP. So in the Windows XP image (or template) open the registry and change

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\ColorDepth

to the value 4.
Not sure if you have to reboot the virtual machine (VM) then, but since rebooting a virtualized XP is quite fast anyway, just reboot it...

Sun Ray and Austrian Smartcards

Together with a good customer and active member of our Sun Ray community we finally got the Austrian Quick cards (sort of a nationwide e-Purse solution for Austria) to work in Sun Rays.

So you can now use your Maestro (“Bankomat”), University Campus Card and other cards of the same type and layout as a Sun Ray token.

Together with the Austrian health care card (“eCard”) we can now claim “100% pop coverage” - as mobile operators do – for Sun Ray compatible cards. Great. I love it.

I'm still unsure how willing users are to actually use a payment card for IT authentication. I know that we don't read any data from the card other than the serial number, but does an end user trust IT equipment with their “money“?

Let's see over the next couple of months.

Here's the way to get it to work:

Download the two smartcard configuration files that Niki Waibel was kind enough to create:

AustrianECard.cfg for the eCard and AustrianQuickEPurse.cfg for the Quick card (or most likely both).

Store them to the /etc/opt/SUNWut/smartcard/ directory on your Sun Ray server(s), and place them on a prominent position with the probe_order.conf (they are #1 and #2 in my configuration here ;-) )

utrestart the Sun Ray Server to make it pick up the change, and voila, you should be able to use the new cards as proper and valid Sun Ray tokens.

Feel free to use it. Should you experience problems, just post a comment here.

Warning: a new Sun Ray Server software patch will most likely remove those files or overwrite the probe_order.conf.

My notebook on a 2x2 SunRay

For a customer demo we setup a 2x2 SunRay Thinclient configuration, i.e. 4 physical screens connected through 4 SunRay units but building one large logical screen. Then I RDP'd against my Windows XP laptop on my ThinkPad T43p.

Cool.

Yes, I'm a freak. So what...

Home PC power consumption

I'm doing some math around the power consumption advantages of thin clients, namely the Sun Ray, versus regular PCs (spell: green IT).
So I borrowed a power meter from a colleague and just checked my own PC, a fairly regular, non-game, non-graphics PC:
2 GHz Athlon, 1GB RAM, 2 HDs, Radeon 9000 on-board graphics, and the usual peripherals like Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers... nothing fancy.

Without the monitor the PC uses the following power (measured right at the power plug):

• 0W when totally switched off at the back-side
• 2,7W (!!!) when switched off only with the front side switch (or shut-down menu),
  as well as in hibernate mode
• 7W (!!!) in stand-by mode
• 115-130W when in use

I could not find a clear correlation between the power consumption and CPU or disk usage. It would just oscillate between 115 and 130W...

So - again without the Monitor - over a whole year, with my regular PC usage at home this amounts for 328kWh or about 6% of my electricity bill.