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I remember lying in bed the night before my Pharmacology exam, a million thoughts racing through my head. One of them was familiar to me - it was whether I should try my hand at medicine, or to stick with optometry. I had been down this train of thought before, but this time something was different. I had just spent the last few days cramming details of drug treatments for everything from asthma to heart failure. I could recite backwards the protocol for pharmacological management of an acute myocardial infarct, and words like rosiglitazone poked at my consciousness, preventing me from falling asleep. This was exciting stuff! The thought of never utilising this information as an optometrist was a little disappointing - it was almost as if I was given a glimpse, a teaser, into the life of medicine only to be returned to reality. Despite this instinctive attraction however, I felt I couldn’t commit to studying for another four years. But then another thought entered my weiry mind: everyone knows med students throw the wildest parties! Four months later I was sitting the Graduate Australian Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT).

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Everyone in the peer-to-peer file sharing community is talking about “BitTorrent”. It seems that this technology is the favourite among file sharers these days, but setting it up to work correctly can be a challenge. Unlike many other click-and-go P2P clients like the infamous KaZaa or the now legitimised Napster, BitTorrent takes some getting used to. Perhaps the most difficult part of BitTorrent configuration to understand, is just what you need to do with those bloody ports! Forums such as Whirlpool are flooded with threads asking “why are my torrents so slow?” and equally-many would-be-gurus giving contradictory advice. In this article, I will aim to demystify the issue of ports in BitTorrent, without getting bogged down in details.

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We finally joined the 21st century in mid-2005 when we signed up to Telstra BigPond Cable broadband. I had been trying to get ADSL for some time, but despite living ridiculously close to an exchange, all attempts had ended in vain. I opted for the wireless option, which included a Motorola SBG900 modem/router, agreed by many on Whirlpool forums to be a more than adequate device. Originally all the computers in the house connected wirelessly, with Chewbacca (my old Celeron 1000, now relegated to file server and download-monkey) using the Telstra-supplied Netgear WG111 802.11g USB dongle.

From day one, I had intermittent problems with using BitTorrent. Almost immediately upon beginning a download, the router would drop the connection and restart. Often this also occured a number of times during a download - not a good thing to happen when you’ve just reached 100+ KB/s, as the torrent would restart and would take a while to reach a decent speed again. To make matters worse, Chewbacca would occasionally restart spontaneously, killing the download for good. All of this caused me great frustration, but (for lack of time or desire) I was never able to pin down a cause. Med school holidays finally gave me enough of the former, and I managed to solve the mystery.

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Well my love affair with Google’s Blogger didn’t last after all. Anyone that knows me could have guessed it - I just like fiddling too much to settle with a one-size-fits-all blogging solution like Blogger. Ultimately it was the lack of cateogories that made me decide to make the switch to WordPress.

Initially I was a little disappointed. I missed Blogger’s WYSIWYG editor, and simplicity of inserting images.  Compared to Blogger, the WordPress interface was also very plain and - dare I say it - boring.  Finally, editing themes was nowhere near as easy or intuitive.  Blogger had an instant preview option which I found very useful, and unfortunately WordPress has nothing similar.

It was around this time that I discovered WordPress plug-ins. Not only did I track down a very capable editor interface (WYSIWYG Plugin For Wordpress), but I realised just how expandable this software was.

The O2 Atom is about to be released in Asia-Pacific countries. I’m eagerly awaiting it’s arrival and am seriously considering forking out for this toy. RRP in Australia is $1,229, but it can be had for just over $1,000 online.

Compared to the O2 XDA II mini, the Atom has:

• Windows Mobile 5
• Integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b)
• Double the memory: 128 Mb versus 64 Mb
• ROM accessible for regular storage, therefore non-volatile. ie. you don’t lose everything if the battery runs out.
• 2 mpx camera vs 1.3 - the mini camera might as well not be there. Let’s hope the atom’s is decent. Camera also has flash, a HUGE advantage as anyone that’s used a flash-less camera will atest.
• FM radio. Not a very significant addition, but it’s nice to have. One more thing to make the atom feel like a real phone.
• Slightly smaller, although slightly thicker too. Also the screen is 0.1 inches smaller, so this may actually be a minus.
• or the vain: The Atom’s black casing looks SEXY!

Aside from the obvious financial disincentive, the main thing cooling my excitement for the Atom is its size. My current Nokia 6100 serves me very well, and is still one of the smallest and best-looking phones around (personal bias). The Atom is both too big (for a phone), and too small (for a PDA). The only way to resolve this is to play with one for a while and see how it fairs.

Update: I spoke to a chap at Harvey Norman today, who said that the Atom has been released, and the supplier is shipping them by the crate-load. At this stage it’s hard to tell when HN will have one, but he expects the week between Christmas and New Year.

Update: Because of the many problems encountered by users with stability and speed, I’ve decided the Atom isn’t for me. The small screen was also an issue and I have since purchased the Palm TX instead.  That said, I am keeping a close eye on the i-mate JAMin, which is proving serious competition to the Atom.

My recommendations in the sub-$AUD500 price range would be either the Palm TX or HP iPaq rx1950. I give considerable weight to the size (especially thickness) and weight of PDAs and these two are among the thinnest and lightest around.

All-round the Palm TX is probably the better buy. The screen is significantly better, and both usability and battery life have been hallmarks of Palm devices for years (although the latter less so lately). I personally have an objection to the casing of the TX and can’t help but feel it’s a little cheap - a shame considering the T5 had a great aluminium casing. The rx1950 is certainly the el cheapo of the PocketPC world, but no other comes close to its remarkable form factor (until Acer release their n300/311 - but these will probably be outside this price range). Depending on your preference, you may like to go with Windows Mobile 5 over PalmOS 5 (note that both are the latest versions of their respective OS). I’m not going to go into the relative pros and cons of the two here (maybe later).

Update: I have since purchased the Palm TX to use as a bedside clinical reference resource. I must say my initial reservations about the build of the TX were unfounded, and it, in fact, does not feel cheap at all. The blue-black plastic is elegant yet light in the pocket.  My final decision to go with the Palm was based on its glorious 320×480 HVGA screen, which made reading pages of medical text a breeze.

I’ve been thinking of starting a blog for a little while now. I often have thoughts, discoveries, and other bits and pieces I’d like to share with the world at large but have always been too lazy to muck around editing my website. Only recently it hit me just how prevalent blogs were on the net these days, and I began to toy with the idea that this may just be the answer to my problems.

I’ve been looking at various free PHP/MySQL-based blog engines but hit the obvious snag that at the moment, my site isn’t hosted somewhere where I have access to these services. Additionally, I really couldn’t be bothered figuring out how to set all this up. I know I could do it, but I’ve got far better things to do right now. I just wanted something that worked - and that led me to Google’s Blogger.

I really love Google. This love affair began with the search engine, and has extended to the marvelous Gmail (more on this in a subsequent blog). Blogger gave me an instant blog, with zero mucking around. In fact it took, from the moment I logged onto the website, to my first entry, no more than 10 minutes. You beaut! I actually found Blogger a little while ago, but it was today’s realisation that I could host it from my own domain that really clinched the deal.

So there you have it folks. For a simple, no-worries, just-works (like everything else Google) blog writer, I couldn’t recommend Blogger more highly. So far my only complaint is that I can’t categorise my blogs. I’d like to group the tech-related entries separately from, say, medical-related entries. One day this may make me upgrade to something more serious, but for the time being Blogger rules.