Tech: October 2006 Archives

New Cell Phone

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I picked up a Nokia E62 today, after being surprised by the small deposit required by Cingular. I had bad credit a few years ago, so when I tried to get a Cingular phone back then, they asked me for an $800 deposit. It was a pleasant surprise not having to front all that money.

My first impressions of the phone are positive. It's a little bulky - definitely not a "girly" phone like the Moto RAZR v3 that I used to have. Symbian OS has gone through a lot of changes since the last time I used it (Nokia 3650). It's a little difficult to find my way around. I actually had to pull out the manual for a few things. It has VPN & SIP support, both of which are hella cool to have although I doubt I'll ever use them. It lacks a camera, but I never really used the camera on my old phone anyways.

I downloaded PuTTY and Google Maps after the data service was finally enabled. Cingular takes a while to get the ball rolling. My old number still hasn't rolled over, although I can place outgoing calls. I'm not too happy with Cingular's plans, but well, I downloaded PuTTY quickly enough to make me giggle.

iSync doesn't currently support the E62, but I've found a few plugins for the E61 online that I'm trying to get working. I'll post with notes if I have any success doing so.

The problem: You've got a 2TB external RAID array. You want to be able to use said array in Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX. What filesystem do you use?

NTFS was one of my first thoughts, but write support under Linux is...bad. It's probably pretty bad in FreeBSD as well. MacOSX only has read support.

Next up? FAT32. To the best of my knowledge, FAT32 has drive size limitations. I don't think it'll be easily readable by Windows. I'm also not sure how permissions work on that. I don't think that they do. I don't screw around with Windows-based filesystems that much. However, it is supported in Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX.

Insert joke about ReiserFS here.

UFS/UFS2: Supported in Linux. UFS is supported in MacOSX as well (I think), but I don't think UFS2 is. I've found a few third party browser utilities for Windows, but none that I would trust.

ext2/ext3: Supported in MacOSX, thoughonly ext2 via a third party. I've read that ext3 partitions can be mounted as ext2, they just lose their journaling abilities. Third party support is also available for Windows, but I'm not sure how great it is. Supported in FreeBSD. Obviously supported in Linux.

So, any recommendations?