Top Tech for Road Warriors

By Jerry Pournelle

July 25, 2005

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Column 300 (Continued from the Previous Week)

On The Road

I don't travel nearly so often now as I did in the early days of this column, when there were computer events and conferences and expositions nearly every week, and I was expected to attend many of them. Even then it was difficult to keep up with the latest tools available to road warriors. Now it's tougher: things flow so much faster, while at the same time I make fewer trips and thus have a bit less incentive to have the latest and greatest. The result is that I learn a lot from each trip. Sometimes what I learn was probably well known to everyone else, but sometimes not.

Power for Travel

For this trip I decided I would carry both Lisabetta, the HP-Compaq TC1100 TabletPC, and Ariadne, the 15-inch Macintosh PowerBook with OSX Tiger. There was a reason for having both machines. First and foremost, I like having a TabletPC. I can use it on an airplane in steerage—this trip was paid for by the US government and there were no upgrade seats available on any flights I could use—even when, as invariably happens, the person in front of me racks the seat all the way back making it nearly impossible to open, much less use, a normal laptop. With the TabletPC and Cross Pen Stylus (if you get a Tablet, I highly recommend the Wacom Cross Pen Stylus with built-in electronic "eraser" as your first accessory) I can edit documents, answer e-mail, and even do a bit of writing without opening up the Tablet at all, and the position of the seat in front of me doesn't matter.

Regarding the TabletPC: You may recall that I "fixed" one problem by installing more memory in my Compaq HP TC1100 TabletPC, even though all indications were that the slowdowns were not due to memory shortages. It turns out that perhaps they were: the TabletPC OS notoriously allowed a memory leak, so that the machines "filled with ink." This is similar to the old "garbage collection" problems we had in the early days of programming, in which memory would be allocated for temporary variables but never reclaimed.

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