MIT’s Media Lab demo’d prototypes of their $100 laptops today, May 23rd. Here’s a photo gallery of the OLPC $100 laptops that are targeted at children in developing nations …and they’re some sweet little machines. Putting aside the issues of black- and gray-market sales of these systems the whole rest of the project is incredibly well thought out.

Our “custom-configured” Windows world has a lot to learn from the design of these little machines. By standardizing both hardware and software configurations they’ve managed to implement 802.11 wireless-mesh networking and a minimal-IT-required Linux system. Should the operating system or software get messed up or infected (…however unlikely that is on Linux) - the whole system can be reimaged without worries of data loss. How do they manage to store data without any expensive servers? Each machine only has 512MB of FlashRAM/non-volatile storage and is designed to share data via a community (the local mesh, I think) wiki system. Sounds a little like Windows roaming profiles, except without the bloat and ability for users to still store data on the local drive; also way ahead of the server-centric network PC/thin client systems encouraged by Oracle, Citrix, Wyse and many hardware manufacturers.

The whole project is well documented at laptop.org, so take a look for yourself.

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Seen any “Delivery Status Notification” messages lately? With many companies (especially AOL, GMail, and Yahoo) upgrading mail servers or updating their spam filters frequently we’ve seen a big increase in how many outgoing emails are returned to us. Still, it could be your own SMTP, DNS, or anti-spam settings that are causing the problem. To be sure, check the retrun and ESMTP status codes that are in the top few lines of the returned message.

Here’s and example: PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 8 ): 554 5.1.0 Sender Denied

In this case it’s easy to see that the message was returned because of an SMTP error. The “Sender Denied” comment on the end means it’s probably because the sending mail server was blacklisted by a spam filter. In most cases it’s not that clear and you need to use the status codes to figure out what happened. The status code in this message is the “554 5.1.0″ part. The format is always *** x.x.x, with the x.x.x part being a return code and the *** being an ESMTP status code. A chart of their meanings is below:

x.x.x, Server Return Codes:
The first value indicates the status of the communication between the sender and recipient server. Possible values are:

• 1 - Server accepted the command, but no action taken. Confirmation message is required.
• 2 - Server successfully completed the task.
• 3 - Server understood the request. More information is required to complete.
• 4 - Server encountered a temporary failure on that request. The command may complete if it’s repeated.
• 5 - Server encountered an error.

The second value is an extra level of detail, which indicates the type of error or communication:

• 0 - Syntax error has occured.
• 1 - Message is an informational reply.
• 2 - Message refers to the connection status.
• 3 - Unspecified, may be used for custom messages.
• 4 - Unspecified, may be used for custom messages.
• 5 - Status message refers to the entire mail system or server.

***, ESMTP Status Codes:
In the event of a failure ESMTP codes can indicate even more detail than server return codes. They can indicate status of either the recipient mail server or your local mail server in response to a problem with your mail client. Possible values are:

• 211 - System status message.
• 214 - Help message formatted for human reader follows.
• 220 - SMTP service ready.
• 221 - Service/connection closing.
• 250 - Successful request. Action completed.
• 251 - Recipient is not local to the server, but the server will accept and forward the message.
• 252 - Recipient can’t be verified, but the server will accept the message and attempt delivery.
• 354 - Start message input now, end with <crlf>.</crlf>. Indicates the server is ready to accept a message once you’ve given it From: and To: information
• 421 - Service is not available and connection will be closed.
• 450 - Requested command failed because the recipient’s mailbox is unavailable.
• 451 - Command has been aborted due to a server error. Possibly notify your SysAdmin.
• 452 - Command has been aborted because the server has insufficient system storage.
• 500 - Server could not recognize the command was due to a syntax error. (usually due to mail client error)
• 501 - Syntax error was found in command arguments. (usually due to mail client error)
• 502 - Command was not implemented. (usually due to mail client error)
• 503 - Server has encounterd a bad command or sequence of commands. (usually due to mail client error)
• 504 - Command parameter is not implemented. (usually due to mail client error)
• 550 - Command failed because the user’s mailbox was unavailable (or you did not have permissions to send to this mailbox)
• 551 - Recipient is not local to the server. Server responds with a fowarding address that should be tried.
• 552 - Action was aborted because storage allocation was exceeded.
• 553 - Action was aborted because the mailbox name was invalid.
• 554 - Transaction failed, without a clear reason.

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Any need to run the new Internet Explorer 7 Beta to test a web app or other project? Problem is that IE 7 doesn’t officially support a standalone mode anymore and installing it removes IE 6.x - so you may be giving up a working IE browser for a buggy beta one. If you’re familiar with Microsoft’s Beta software then you may also know that they have a tendency to have poor uninstall routines that end up forcing you to manually remove “leftovers” before you can install the official release of IE 7.

There is an easy way to run the IE 7 browser in standalone mode, thanks to Jon Galloway. Below in Step #3, I’ve added a VBS script that hides the DOS window that needs to be kept open in his version. Here are the steps:

1. Download the IE 7 Beta installer, “IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe” is the current version. Extract the files in the installer by opening a command line to the folder it’s saved in and type “IE7BETA2-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe -e” to extract it to a temporary folder (something like C:\abcdefghijklmnop\), or use WinRAR if you have it installed already. Before closing the popup notification message, copy all the extracted files from the temporary folder to a permanent folder, I’ll use C:\IE7\ in the example. You can change the folder name, but edit the attached scripts if you’re going to change their filenames.
2. Create a file named IE7.bat in the folder C:\IE7\ and paste in Jeff Galloway’s IE7 script:
   

   @ECHO OFF
   TITLE IE7 Launcher 1.4

   ECHO IE7 STANDALONE LAUNCHER 1.4
   ECHO Updated for IE7 Beta 2 Preview
   ECHO.
   ECHO Do not close this window or it will not clean up after itself properly.
   ECHO You can pass a URL into this batch file, like this:
   ECHO ie7.bat www.microsoft.com
   ECHO.
   ECHO More info here: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/12/28/434132.aspx
   ECHO.
   ECHO When you close IE7, this will remove the registry key and shut itself down.
   ECHO.
   ECHO Setting up IE7 for standalone mode…
   PUSHD %~dp0

   ECHO Removing IE7 registry key and set the version vector to “7.0000″.
   > %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO REGEDIT4
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO.
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{C90250F3-4D7D-4991-9B69-A5C5BC1C2AE6}]
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{000214E5-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector]
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO “IE”=”7.0000″
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO.
   :: Merge the REG file to delete the IE7 standalone entry
   REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg

   REN SHLWAPI.DLL SHLWAPI.DLL.BAK
   TYPE NUL > IEXPLORE.exe.local
   ECHO Running IE7…
   iexplore.exe “%1″

   :: Merge the REG file to delete the IE7 standalone entry
   REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg
   :: Delete the temporary REG file
   DEL %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg

   ECHO Removing IE7 standalone files…
   REN SHLWAPI.DLL.BAK SHLWAPI.DLL
   DEL IEXPLORE.exe.local

   :: Set the old version vector “6.0000″.
   > %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO REGEDIT4
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO.
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector]
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO “IE”=”6.0000″
   >>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO.
   REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg
   DEL %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg

   POPD
   ECHO Complete, closing…

3. Create a file named IE7.vbs in the folder C:\IE7\ and add the following VBS script:
   

   Set oShell = CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)
   oShell.Run “ie7.bat”, 0, True

4. That’s it. To run IE 7, just create a shortcut to the IE7.vbs file and don’t worry about cleanup or keeping any DOS windows open.

Article tagged: Internet+Explorer+7, IE7, beta, beta2, standalone, fix, test, script, hack,

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Wireless USB and PCMCIA (PC Card) adapters now available are very similar in performance. There is little reason, other than personal preference to choose one over the other. There is good reason to choose a laptop with a built-in Wi-Fi adapter over an external option, so if you’re considering saving a few dollars by getting a USB or PC Card adapter instead - don’t.

Wireless range is directly related to the amount of power sent through the antenna. Since laptop devices usually have less powerful antennas than base stations plugged into the wall, early reports of inferior range in USB wireless devices were because the USB bus supplied less power (ref. #1 below) than the PC Card bus (ref. #2 below). Now that the antennas on both types of devices are very similar and most Windows XP drivers allow Windows to manage the power used by the wireless device automatically it’s rare for either USB or PC Card devices to either be run at full power or for one type to have a better range than the other.

An internal wi-fi card is a big improvement over the above options, because the antenna are much larger and more sensitive. Most laptops with internal wireless devices have an antenna wire in around the outside edge of the screen, making a big improvement over any external options, regardless of power output.

Also, PC Card technology has more power-saving modes (handled automatically by the PC Card controller, ref. #2 below) than USB does. Before Windows XP started to manage power via the driver - PC Card wireless devices went into low-power mode more often and depleted the battery less than USB devices did. Now there is little to no noticable difference in battery use by either device. …although, when a laptop is put to sleep either device will continue to consume a small amount of battery power if it is left in the laptop. Since USB has slightly better hot-plug support (ie: it can be removed and reinserted without causing errors on the PC) it is usually easier to remove it when putting the PC to sleep. …so, maybe USB is the way to go for you.

Note on Wireless-B, -G, and -N: It’s worth paying attention to the type of communication that a wireless device uses. All Wi-Fi devices “speak” some form of the 802.11 “language”. The letter after the 802.11 indicates the “flavor” of the language - and some are much better/faster than the other flavors. 802.11G deals with radio “noise” (like microwaves and cordless phones) better than 802.11B. Also, if you can find a “pre-N” (pre-802.11N) wireless device choose it (if it’s in your budget). The pre-N technology may not work with the final 802.11N, but all N-flavor devices have much better antennas than the B or G flavors. So, the “best” flavor is “pre-N”, followed by “G”, and then by “B”.

References:

1. http://www.usb-port.com/usb_faq.html - USB supplies 500mA @ 5V
2. http://www.pcmcia.org/pccard.htm - PC Card supplies 660mA @ 5V, 1000mA @ 3.3V

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