BeBook Mini

Ever since I saw Sony’s PRS-600, I was searching for my e-book reader to call my own. I wanted something cheaper and similar in size. I did like other Sony devices - PRS-505 and PRS-300, but they had one big flow - they weren’t available in Croatia.

Looking for alternatives, I came upon quite a few devices and my choice was divided between Jinke Hanlin v3 and v5. While v3 had little bit bigger screen (6 inches), I decided upon newer v5. It has smaller screen (5 inches) but it also features faster processor and newer display controller.

Jinke also offers re-branding of Hanlin eReader V5 so same device can also be found under name of BeBook mini, Astak 5" EZ Reader Pocket PRO and lbook V5.

Since there is BeBook mini available in Croatia (Sveznadar bookstore), I decided upon it. It will definitely make my life easier in case of warranty.

Device is fairly light (160 g) and it fits hand quite comfortably. There are three separate sets of next/previous buttons so there is no problem finding comfortable position - even if you are left-handed.

Screen has great resolution (600x800 at 200 dpi) and it is quite confortable to read. If you have light pointed right at it, there is some reflection, but it is quite manageable. As with all eInk devices, there is black flash upon page change but I got quite used to it after a while. Epson controller and fast processor (400 MHz ARM) are doing quite nice job at minimizing time between page turns.

I was quite surprised that my device came with last firmware update already installed. While procedure for installing firmware is not too hard, this is quite a nice gesture from manufacturer. Great thing to note here is that boot loaded is in separated area of flash and there is almost no possibility of bricking your device with bad update. If something goes wrong, just repeat update.

I will not list all supported formats here since list is quite extensive. I will only note that there is no support for newest docx (Microsoft Office 2007) file format. Older doc files are supported so conversion is not too hard. Some formats are supported by Adobe’s engine (ePub and PDF) and others are displayed by CoolReader so there are some inconsistencies in user interface. Nice touch is selection among quite a few fonts already integrated within system or uploading custom one.

Bookshelf interface supports folders as main sorting mechanism and I like this quite a lot. Only issue I found with it is displaying system folders - fonts, Digital Editions and Restore_PC folders are always shown and there is no way of hiding it. Since one entry is already used for Recent files, only four entries will be visible on first page. This means lot of “next page” movement - especially if you happen to have Work folder that happens to be on far end of alphabet.

I find this device quite comfortable to use. It may not be easy to use for non-technical person, but it is getting better and better with each firmware update. If it continues this rate of development, we will have a treat in a year. For those with little bit more free time and courage, there is also SDK available. Customization may commence.

[2010-09-13: Unfortunately my device got broken - all analysis point to screen glass damage. I am open for advice regarding which device to choose next.]

[2010-11-26: I opted for Kindle 2 as my next device. So far I like everything except it’s size - it could lose keyboard.]

Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2010

Team Foundation Server 2010 works great when combined with Visual Studio 2010. However, if you wish to combine it with Visual Studio 2008, some additional setup is required.

First thing that you need to install is Team Explorer 2008. If you already used source control, you may have it. Easiest way to check is to go into Tools > Options and select Source Control. If there is “Visual Studio Team Foundation Server” in plug-in list, you can skip this download.

Another thing I installed was Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010. I do not think that this long-named update is really “must” but I decided to install it anyhow - just in case.

Once you install everything, you can try adding Team Foundation Server 2010 as destination, but you will be greeted with error “TF31002: Unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server …”. Reason behind this is that old Team Explorer 2008 does not know anything about collections.

Solution would be to add it as full path (e.g “http://server:8080/tfs/collection”). I could not do it because every time I entered full path, I also got error “TF30335: The server name cannot contain characters ‘/’ or ‘:’ …”. Since official way would not work it was time to come up with alternative.

In order to add TFS 2010 server, you will need to exit Visual Studio 2008 and go into Registry editor. Find key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers” and at this location just add string value. Name of this value will be what Team Explorer 2008 will use for display. It’s value is full address of your server. It should be something like “http://server:8080/tfs/collection”.

Now you can go into Visual Studio 2008 and Team Explorer will have new entry. As you work with it, you will notice that not everything is “bump-free” (e.g. tasks). However, source control it self will work perfectly and that was enough for me.

Prepare for Repairs

Quite unfortunately, I needed to send my laptop (6730b) for servicing. This made me think about my both personal and business data. I needed something that would keep data private even in case of direct disk access.

Obvious choice would be BitLocker Drive Encryption. But this comes with great disadvantage. It is not possible to boot up laptop in order to check functioning of Windows.

Another choice would be NTFS encryption. It is applicable on files and folders and encryption key is connected to user. As long as you don’t give your password (or backup key), your data is safe.

Most of personal data I had were documents and pictures but I decided to encrypt everything under user account: documents, pictures, videos, settings… It proved to be easier to encrypt everything in Users folder that to hand pick each item.

Most of business data was already encrypted with one exception - SQL Server. In order to ensure compatibility with every edition, I didn’t use SQL Server’s own encryption (available only in Enterprise edition). NTFS encryption works without problems once you stop SQL service. Once encryption is done, you can restart it again.

During encryption (it took quite a while) Windows 7 reminded me to backup my encryption key. Procedure was quite easy (next, next, next…) and fast. In case of something happening to user account, that is only way of restoring access to data.

After whole encryption process was done, I shut my computer down and packed it in original box and sent it to manufacturer. Hopefully, I will get it back soon enough.

Adding References in Visual Studio 2010

One of things that I noticed during work in new Visual Studio 2010 is speed of Add Reference dialog. This dialog now appears immediately while in old Visual Studio (2008, 2005…) this would take ages. I was quite stunned until I compared those two. There were two improvements that made this possible.

Loading of .NET and and COM references is done in separate thread. This means that while loading is in progress everything stays responsive.

Another improvement is that dialog opens with Projects tab as default one. Quite often this is exactly what you need - to add project reference. And even if you wish to add .NET reference, by the time your (non-threaded) hand switches to .NET tab, everything is already filled there (since loading is done asynchronously).

Worst case scenario is using COM objects and that will take awful amount of time for loading all references. But nobody uses those anyhow… :)

IntelliTrace May Not Be Your Friend

Visual Studio 2010 has one great feature. I works like this (I simplified a little): you turn on debugging, wait for program to crash, load debugging log and you can walk through state of each variable in program, go back and forward in time - almost like working on live machine.

Microsoft used to call this Historical debugger, but now (with beta 2) same feature can be found under IntelliTrace branding.

Of course, this is only available in most expensive version of Visual Studio - Ultimate. Buyers of all other version can just drool. I know I will.