Recently (well recent when I started this post 8 weeks back!) I returned from Wireless Field Day (WFD) 3, based out of San Jose, California. Firstly a quick re-cap for those not familiar. Wireless Field Day is an event unlike any other in the wireless community. It brings together wireless vendors, social media-savvy folk (delegates) and the wider wireless community. Wireless Field Day, under the umbrella of Tech Field Day, is organized by Steven Foskett with the wireless spin-off originally conceived by Jennifer Huber.
Of the vendors that presented at WFD3, I have
worked with Cisco, Metageek and Omnipeek. From a hands-on perspective, the
other vendors were new to me. Consequently blog posts concerning these
other vendors will come once I have had a chance to take a deep dive into their
doco and play with their hardware, for those vendors that supplied it. If you
want to check out the vendor presentation videos and the other delegates’
thoughts on the event take a look at the Wireless Field Day 3 page.
In the meantime, I thought I would throw up
a review of some vendor SWAG… Specifically, the pens!
First up we have the Ruckus-provided orange number. This style of pen is fairly standard
when it comes to vendor SWAG. Whilst this pen
does the job when it comes to putting ink-to-paper, there is nothing
particularly special about it. If you look closely you can see inflictions
present in the ‘R’, ‘u’, ‘k’ and ‘s’ – these take away from the impact that
‘Ruckus’ may otherwise have on the page. I suspect this comes down to a low
grade of ball-bearing used in the pen.
Next up, we have the WildPackets pen. This little number features all of your standard pen
features – the ability to be held, the ability to inpart ink onto the page and
finally the ability to actually hold a reservoir of ink. Whilst also being made
from a semi-opaque plastic, this pen features a rubber ‘comfort grip’. This feature aids in your ‘comfort’ whilst
‘gripping’ the pen – truly revolutionary stuff and second only to Gillette
adding the totally-not-needed fifth blade to oneof their razors! The pen also outputs blue ink. Now I really want to make
this clear – I am not penist in any way however I do favour blue ink over black.
It just looks nicer on the page. That and the comfort grip put it ahead of the
Ruckus number.
Last up we have the meraki pen. This handsome looking pen sports an outer casing made
from some sort of metallic material – quite possibly metal. Enough with the pens external aesthetics – how does it look when the pen hits the paper.
Pretty damn great! In addition to the fantastic text-formation, it has the
smoothest writing motion of all the pens – a clear winner! I have over-looked
the ink colour due to the superb performance.
Whilst the meraki pen is undoubtedly the
winner of the three it does not trump my existing pen, although comes in a close
second. Whilst meraki did provide the
notepad for the pen-test, I have no reason to believe that this improved the
pens performance. Many in the pen-testing community have suggested a special
coating may exist on the paper to account for the fantastic performance – this
is pure speculation with absolutely nothing to back the claim up.
The meraki will work nicely for me,
providing pen-redundancy in case of primary-pen failure… unless the WAN link is
down ;). Oh yes, I went there! At this stage, I believe this isn’t a hitless
fail-over and would involve me tossing my primary pen in the bin and reaching
into my bag to grab the meraki. I am considering taping the two pens together
to provide true HA!
As for future vendor SWAG, I would like to
see a quill and ink provided, just for something a little different – back to
the old school!
Some have suggested that declaring meraki
the pen performance winner when it was only compared with two other vendors’
pens is unfair… and they’re probably right. But hey, if it works for Juniper
;).
If you’ve made it this far, you probably
want the last 5 minutes of your life back! Unfortunately I can’t help you with
that; I can however offer up some thoughts on Wildpackets Omnipeek in my next
post!
