Review

Lands' End, You Are Dead to Me.

Posted on by tarus

[UPDATE: Lands’ End contacted me and went to great links to rectify the situation, so be sure to click through to the link if you decide to read this.]

I can’t stress how important computer systems are to today’s business world. Here is an example of a company who is doing it wrong and one who is doing it right.

For years I’ve used LandsEnd Business Outfitters for our OpenNMS polos. The shirts are high quality, the ordering process is simple and on the occasion that I do need help, a human picks up in three rings and solves my problem with that one call.

Then, they “upgraded their system”. Now, my orders don’t get processed, when I call I sit in queue for a half hour (thank goodness for speaker phones) and when I do get to speak to a human, they don’t have any visibility into the order process so they can’t tell me a valid status. Then they make stuff up, like “well, your order was placed a month ago so it should be shipping by the end of the week”. When the end of the week comes and goes and it doesn’t ship, I have to repeat the process.

To add insult to injury, they are offering people who place orders now free logos. The order I canceled this morning was for nearly US$3000, over US$500 of which was logo fees. If I restarted the process now it probably wouldn’t take a month and I’d save a ton of money, but if I had remained “loyal” it would cost me. Did they offer some sort of concession due to the delay? No, so I’m looking to switch companies (perhaps Brand Fuel – anyone have a suggestion?).

Contrast this with Amazon. Amazon consistently under promises and over delivers, which two day orders arriving in one, and offering one day Saturday delivery in some places.

Recently I had to place orders on amazon.co.uk and amazon.de. Not only did my US login work on those sites, all of my account information was also available. Heck, even their “Prime” shipping service worked for me in Germany. The order I placed on the German site was done totally in German, which I don’t speak, yet the process was so similar to what I experience on the US site that it took me the same amount of time to process the order.

Guess who gets to keep me as a customer?

The Centurylink Amateurs Are At It Again

Posted on by tarus

Hey, #centurylink, if you want to play with the big boys, you are going to have to invest in qualified people. Not people who take out business networks for hours at a time.

I was looking forward to starting my Labor Day vacation a little early today, but that’s not going to happen. About 2am this morning Centurylink made some changes to their network (both my home DSL circuit and my father’s, who lives an hour away, got new DHCP address) and the network at the office went down completely.

When I called, the automated voice told me that they were aware of the outage and that it would be fixed by 4pm.

Now:

a) in what universe is a business class circuit allowed to have a 14 hour outage?

b) who does a major network change on a Friday?

c) who does a major network change on a Friday before a major holiday?

d) If you can’t plan an outage, including disaster recovery, to last less than an hour or two, get out of the business.

This was on top of a routing loop last week that almost cost me a major customer (since we had a demo planned and couldn’t reach the server we needed).

I waited a couple of hours and then decided I wanted to vent. So I called Centurylink back. I didn’t expect it to get anything fixed faster but I figured I’d at least get a “mea culpa” and a little “we screwed up – sorry”.

The monkey in first level who answered the call not only did not apologize, but seemed to act if 14 hour outages were normal. When I explained to him that my business depends on that circuit and in fact we’d flown a guy up from Atlanta in order to work today (but that couldn’t happen from the office, now could it) he dismissed my concerns with “well, it’s an area outage, not just your circuit”.

I then pointed out that my home DSL line was fine, and since I live 10 miles from the office it obviously wasn’t an “area outage”. His suggestion? We needed to upgrade to a T1.

A T1? Was is this, 1993?

When I pointed out that a T1 was only 1.544 Mbps he told me I was wrong, that it was much faster than the 10 Mbps I was getting now. I suggested that there might be some sort of technology one could run over a T1 that would result in higher realized speeds (i.e. DSL over a T1 versus a POTS line) and that must be what he was referring to, he continued to insist that a T1 was much faster.

(sigh)

I then asked to speak to a manager, and was told I couldn’t but that the monkey would be happy to relay any concerns I had.

I’m going to do it myself after the Time Warner guy gets back to me with my new office circuit. I recommend that anyone running a business that depends on Internet access stay as far as possible away from Centurylink, and that probably goes for voice service as well considering the level of customer support they find acceptable.

Some Thoughts on the Apple/Samsung Silliness (#noapple)

Posted on by tarus

My indentured servitude to AT&T ended recently and I decided to use that to jump in for another two years but also to get rid of my iPhone 4.

As my three readers are aware, last summer I decided to move away from Apple products toward freer alternatives. I still have a Macbook Air (running Ubuntu – natch) and up until last Thursday I had an iPhone.

I pretty much liked the iPhone, but it was mainly a consumer device (i.e. I didn’t create much using it) so I didn’t care so much, but I did get frustrated with the terms of service. It was easier for me to freakin’ buy the OpenNMS app than it was to spend 30 minutes or so every other month trying to update my project keys so I could check it out and build it. I settled on the Samsung Galaxy S3 as a replacement.

Having used it now for several days, I have to admit that I’m a little pissed at all of the talk about how Samsung (and implicitly, Google) ripped off Apple. Using the S3 is a greatly different experience from using the iPhone.

I almost wrote “totally” but I have to admit that, yes, there is a virtual keyboard, and yes, you can have a page of icons that you press to launch apps, but outside of that there is little in common between the two.

First, the phone just feels different. It is bigger, thinner and feels lighter to me (although in the interest of full disclosure I have a case on the iPhone 4 since without it my calls drop when I hold it in my left hand). The iPhone felt like a dense, solid slab whereas the S3 feels more like a bar of soap, all smooth and round edges. I am afraid that it might squirt out of my hand one of these days.

Next, the user experience is different. The way one navigates Android takes a little bit to get used to coming from iOS, but the fact that in addition to a physical home button I have two soft buttons (one for contextual menus and one for “back”) seem to make the UI experience a little cleaner (since there doesn’t have to be so many menu icons in the apps). Notifications are different, the way you can control placement of icons is different, and the idea of widgets seems pretty unique to Android. Widgets let you display information without having to actually open an app.

The one disappointment I’ve had is that the S3 doesn’t work with Banshee or Rhythmbox, so it is harder to organize my media files. I am hoping this gets fixed soon.

Android 4.0+ uses the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) instead of just mounting the filesystem like a USB disk. I can get Ubuntu to mount the phone just fine, but when I launch Banshee it umounts the phone and then hangs. Under Rhythmbox it shows up as a Media Device, but the moment you try to access it (say, right click on it and choose Properties) it kills the app. There is an open bug on that one, but despite its use of Mono I much prefer Banshee.

Now, the S3 ships with the usual amount of kruft that you find on modern technology. Samsung has their own sync technology called Kies (no Linux client of course [sigh]) and I thought it might be interfering with libmtp. So less than 24 hours after I bought the phone I’d rooted it and installed Cyanogenmod (CM9 – not comfortable playing with the CM10 betas just yet).

Cool.

Now I don’t have any apps I don’t want, and I understand what all the apps I have installed are actually supposed to do. I haven’t seen any real performance problems with the exception of the camera crashing once and some browser issues that went away when I switched to Chrome.

With the exception of the issue managing my media, I am quite happy with this phone. The screen isn’t as crisp as the iPhone 4 but its large size really makes a difference with my aging eyes. But how anyone could confuse the two is beyond me. I hope this patent silliness goes away soon and in the meantime I’m going to vote with my wallet.

Digger and the Hugo Awards

Posted on by tarus

Okay, no OpenNMS or open source content today, but since most free software geeks also like fantasy and science fiction literature I figure this might be of interest to the three people who read this blog.

One of the highest honors a writer of this genre can receive is a Hugo Award. They are given out every year by the World Science Fiction Society at their annual convention. This year I learned that anyone attending the convention can vote for the Hugo Award winners. I thought it was something like the Academy Awards where only other people in the business could vote. I was wrong. Better yet, I learned that by becoming a supporting member, anyone can vote even without attending the convention.

How great is that?

This is important to me, since a friend of mine, Ursula Vernon, has had her graphic novel series Digger nominated in the “Best Graphic Story” category. I think it would be awesome if someone who lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina, won a Hugo Award. Plus, her work is pretty fantastic on its own. And if Patrick Rothfuss can pimp out his editor, I can pimp out my friend.

Before I lose more readers with another “TL;DR” post, I just want to encourage anyone with a love of science fiction and fantasy to sign up as a supporting member and to vote. It’s US$50, but you get digital copies of most of the nominated work (DRM-free, and no, don’t ask me for a copy). If you bought just the “Best Novel” nominees it would be way more than fifty bucks, and you get exposed to amazing shorter work that rarely finds a market.

I always like to be an informed voter, so I am making a dedicated effort to read all of the nominees. Well, except for “Best Graphic Story” since my mind’s made up on that one. (Well, and Betsy Wollheim for “Best Editor – Long Form” since I trust Patrick’s judgement)

Digger is about a wombat. Wombats are marsupials native to Australia that dig extensive tunnel systems. The story starts out with our heroine digging (as wombats are wont to do) but she gets lost and emerges in a world both like and unlike her own. In an attempt to find her way back home, she enlists the help of a talking statue of the god Ganesh, unintentionally partners with a childlike shadow being (who gets her out of a couple of tight places involving hyenas) and listens to the prophecies of an oracular slug.

Cool huh?

The comics are available online, but I plan to buy the printed volumes. I am rationing them, one a month (I just ordered Volume 2 from Amazon). Check them out and then remember to vote! I also want to point out that the other nominees involve teams of people – Ursula both writes and illustrates her work – so that should be worth some extra consideration.

As far as the other Hugo Award categories, I’m working my way through the “Best Novel” nominees. The one to beat will be George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons which is the fifth book in the Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones) series. I pre-ordered this and read it the day it came out and I wasn’t disappointed, so while it is a bit cliché it has my vote at the moment.

I just finished Embassytown by China Miéville last night. I enjoyed Kraken, but didn’t like this one as much. It starts off a lot like Stephenson’s Anathem, with a lot of linguistics that don’t make a lot of sense until you just plow through it for fifty pages or so. Unlike Anathem it is much more a book focused on the link between language and thought. Like pizza, when Miéville is good he’s really good and when he’s bad he’s still pretty good, I did enjoy the book and read the second half pretty much in one sitting, but if I am honest with myself I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as A Dance with Dragons.

Tonight I start Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey. I’ve never read anything by him but perhaps since he has two middle initials he can give Martin a run for the money. (grin)

UPDATE: Leviathan Wakes is awesome. At the moment it is my choice for the Hugo Award. I read it as non-stop as I could.

In part it was due to the writing style. “James S. A. Corey” is the pen name of a pair of authors, one who worked for George R. R. Martin. There is Martin DNA all over this book. It starts off with a rather brutal and shocking scene, but then they don’t return to it for several hundred pages. Every chapter is written from the point of view of one of the two main characters (although in third person) and most end in cliff hangers which makes you want to read the next one.

I ordered Caliban’s War, the second book in the series, halfway through this one.

Although this may make me sound a little like Harlan Ellison who, in his dotage, seems to be claiming to have written every science fiction story, I find myself making comparisons between any modern space opera that involves genetic mutation with Donaldson’s Gap series, Leviathan brings enough uniqueness and style to the genre that I’m certain I’ll devour the series.

Ready Player One

Posted on by tarus

Note: This is a somewhat long review of the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. The short version is that if you are over 40 and you self-identify as a geek, you’ll love this book. Even if you are not over 40, you should check it out, but it will really resonate if you were a teenager during the 1980s. The following is as spoiler-free as I can make it, but if you are a purist, you might want to skip it.

I was first introduced to Ready Player One on the blog of Patrick Rothfuss. Usually, that is enough to make me at least check it out, but it was also item number three in Entertainment Weekly’s top ten list, and that surprised me since EW isn’t exactly known for its coverage of science fiction/fantasy.

Now before you start teasing me about reading EW (or even referring to it as “EW”) I don’t do it to keep up with the latest antics of Brittany Spears (she’s such a little scamp, isn’t she?). In my job it is sometimes a good idea to have some handle on popular culture, so now I know about that nice young man named Ted Situation who lives in New Jersey with his sister Snookie and they do that charity work on the coast. Plus, I keep it in the bathroom, and I find that the articles are the perfect length for the amount of time I spend there. Assuming I’m eating right, I can get through an issue in about a week, which is how often it is published.

Anyway, the basic plot is as follows: it is the year 2041, and the world is not a pleasant place. World economies have collapsed, the environment is a wreck and energy is scarce. Most people escape the drudgery of their lives in a online simulation called the OASIS (think Second Life crossed with World of Warcraft with a dash of Gibson’s Cyberspace). The creator of the OASIS is videogame designer James Halliday, who quite naturally is also one of the world’s richest men.

When the story opens, Halliday has just died. Having no heirs, he has placed his entire fortune, including a majority stake in the company that owns the OASIS, into an Easter Egg (extra, undocumented code put into a game or application) hidden in the simulation itself. The first person to find it, gets it. The story follows one such egg hunter (or “gunter”) as he searches for clues, all of which are based on things from the 1980s.

With that premise, I expected a nice little stroll down memory lane with nostalgia.

I did not expect nostalgia to punch me in the gut.

The book brought up memories of things I haven’t thought about in decades. For example, Halliday’s first video game console was an Atari 2600. My first video game console was an Atari 2600 – which I still have, by the way (and in the original box). At one point in the novel the plot involves Dungeons and Dragons, specifically a module called Tomb of Horrors. I can remember playing Tomb of Horrors. I didn’t remember it before reading the book, but as the scene was described I was thinking to myself “isn’t that the module with the sphere of annihilation at the end of the first corridor?” and sure enough, there it is, in the next paragraph.

I can also remember coming home from school and turning the antenna toward Charlotte to bring in this UHF station that carried Japanese shows (yes, kiddies, back in the day television came in over the air and not in on a little wire). One I remember involved a giant gold robot/rocketship named Goldar and his wife, a silver robot/rocketship named Silvar. Apparently that was The Space Giants. There was also an animated show involving a World War II era battleship flying through space. That, apparently, was Space Battleship Yamato.

There were also copious references to 80s music and movies, all of which really resonated with me. At one point the video game Tempest is referenced, and I was once part owner of a Tempest machine when I was at Harvey Mudd.

Cline even uses the term “open source” on a number of occasions. The bad guy in the novel is the IOI corporation, a services provider that has made a lot of money in the OASIS. From the book:

Like most gunters, I was horrified at the thought of IOI taking control of the OASIS. The company’s PR machine had made its intentions crystal clear. IOI believed that Halliday never properly monetized his creation, and they wanted to remedy that. They would start charging a monthly fee for access to the simulation. They would plaster advertisements on every visible surface. User anonymity and free speech would become things of the past. The moment IOI took it over, the OASIS would cease to be the open-source virtual utopia I’d grown up in.

Now the OASIS is in no way an open source product or platform. It just isn’t, but I so much prefer someone misinterpreting the term to mean “freedom” instead of “well, all I have to do is just expose the code”. The heroes in the book do embody a lot of what is sometimes called The Open Source Way in their behavior, goals and interactions with others.

Cline claims that the first ever Easter Egg can be found in the game Adventure for the Atari 2600. He states that back then, game designers were never recognized or given credit for their creations. This changed when Warren Robinett hid his name in Adventure.

There is a secret room in the game. In order to get to it, a number of things must happen. First, you have to retrieve a tiny, one pixel object hidden in a maze. Second, in the room next to the hidden room, you have to bring a number of objects (I think it is three). When you do this, the objects will start to flash. That has nothing to do with the Easter Egg but is instead an artifact due to the processor in the console being so slow that it couldn’t refresh more than two objects at a time. It is the same reason that the aliens in Space Invaders sped up as you kill them – the processor could then make fewer aliens move faster.

Once the barrier on the side of the room is flashing, and you have the “grey dot”, you can pass into a room that looks like this:

That was taken from my Atari Flashback machine – I didn’t want to have to dig out the old CRT television to hook up the original one I have.

Since so much of my enjoyment came from the fact that I lived through this time period, I am not sure how younger people will find the book. At one point in time I thought I’d figured out a plot point that would have really disappointed me (think deus ex machina) but I was wrong. I think the story stands enough on its own that geeks of all ages will enjoy it.

Lovin' Me Some SOGo (#noapple)

Posted on by tarus

I really want to thank “jm k” for sending me a note awhile back on the SOGo project.

One of my big complaints about Android has always been that one must rely too much on hosting your data at Google to get the most benefit out of it. I have a nonnegotiable requirement to be able to synchronize my contacts and calendars across devices, and for the moment Apple doesn’t force me to use iCloud. However, I want to move away from iOS, so some sort of sync solution is required.

Any solution must be multi-platform. Most of the guys in the office have iPhones and MacBooks. Jeff has an Android phone and runs Fedora on his laptop. I run Ubuntu on my work desktop and, for the moment, OS X on my Macbook Air and the desktop at home.

Enter SOGo. SOGo is an open source “groupware” (how I hate that term) solution that enables one to manage calendars and contacts through a webUI, as well as desktop and mobile devices. The webUI also includes an IMAP connector that lets you access an IMAP server (a lá Squirrelmail – although one of the gotchas that hit me was that I couldn’t send mail unless the “To:” address was in my contacts).

For those that think open source can’t be beautiful, the webUI is very clean and attractive. It’s also all AJAX-y so you can manage your information as if you were using a native app (i.e. right click on a contact to bring up a menu that lets you update, delete, etc.).

But the real power lies in its sync capabilities. It implements both CalDAV and CardDAV protocols, which are becoming more widespread, and it is now possible for me to sync up most of my worlds.

Getting started isn’t super easy, however. Jeff did most of the work getting it installed on one of our Debian Squeeze servers (they supply packages) and while it is easy to get the software on the machine, getting it configured is another matter. It is pretty important to use LDAP for user management, and since we don’t have tons of LDAP experience there was a learning curve.

Being the boss has its benefits, so I pretty much sat back and complained a lot. However, I was able to help in getting the Apple stuff to sync, and especially in the case of the OS X Address Book the procedure borders on ritualistic.

In the hope that someone else will find this useful, here’s how I got the Address Book to sync.

Launch the Address Book, go to Preferences -> Accounts and add a new CardDAV account. Put in your server name, username and password and hit “Next”. This will cause the application to verify its connection to SOGo.

In our case, it failed. My belief is that it is due to the fact that the path the the SOGo DAV share doesn’t start at root.

After a lot of trial and error, I found a solution. After you create the account, look in the

~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources

directory and you should see a code for the account profile, something like this:

12B84577-CE41-4AB8-9CD6-91E2796E3A99

Descend into that directory and you’ll see a file called “Configuration.plist”. You’ll have to edit that file and make three changes:


        <key>haveWriteAccess</key>
        <integer>1</integer>
        <key>isSharedABAccount</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
...
        <key>servername</key>
        <string>https://sogo.example.com:443/SOGo/dav/tarus</string>
        <key>username</key>
        <string>tarus</string>

Make sure “haveWriteAccess” is set to 1 (true), “isSharedABAccount” is set to zero (false), and the “servername” string should be the fully qualified path to your user’s DAV share on the SOGo server (the port must be explicitly stated, even though one would assume the “https” tag would default to that).

And please use SSL for the connection – this is a lot of personal data you’ll be putting up there.

Anyway, hats off to the SOGo team as well as to Jeff for getting this running. Check out their demo if you are interested (username and password both “sogo1”). Now all that we have left is to set up a Firefox sync server for bookmarks and passwords and we should have synchronization covered.

How the Other Half Lives

Posted on by tarus

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and a week ago I found myself flying into Harrisburg, PA so that I could visit with our client Hershey Medical Center.

Now I fly pretty exclusively on American Airlines. They tend to be competitive, and since I’ve had elite status with them for years it makes flying a slightly more pleasant experience.

But to get from RDU to MDT on American was over $1100. This is a trip I can drive in 7.5 hours (assuming DC traffic isn’t insane) and I’ve flown to Europe and back for less. Not sure why it is so pricy, but I had to look for alternatives.

I found a Delta flight for a little over $300 and decided to take it. In the interest of full disclosure, even though the plane had “Delta” on it, all four flights were on commuter airlines contracted by Delta, so my review may not reflect on the airline as a whole.

The outbound trip had me connecting through Cincinnati with a nearly four hour layover, so I decided to spend the extra $39 and get a one day access to their lounge.

When I was younger I hated airline lounges. The only time I got to enter them was as a guest of some executive, and I thought the expense wasn’t worth it.

Now that I fly 80K-100K miles per year, I’ve learned to love my airline club. It is just so nice to have a decent place to sit that’s clean and relatively quiet, and in the chance that there is a problem with your plane, the agents in the club are perfectly poised to help correct it. With free Internet usually available, I can even get some work done. Also, by using my company’s BusinessExtrAA points, it’s even free.

So the first thing I did on this trip was check out the Delta club. At RDU, the two clubs are American’s Admirals Club and Delta’s Sky Club. My first impression was that I liked the appearance of the Admirals Club a little better, although the Sky Club was still nice. But Delta won hands down on food.

An Admiral’s club will usually have some sort of salty snack mix, apples and oranges, and cookies (a ginger, a shortbread and a chocolate chip). Occasionally you’ll get veggies and dip, but unless you are in an international first class lounge, that’s it.

Delta had a bit more. What got me excited was that they had hummus …

… in a tube.

During this year I’ve worked hard to drop some weight, and hummus is my go-to snack. It is incredibly hard to eat well while traveling. Delta won my heart with this small gesture. And it wasn’t just Raleigh – the Cincinnati club had it too.

As for the plane trip itself – it was quite pleasant as far as these things go. I was able to board without a problem and the planes were clean and newer than I’m used to on AA. Both my planes heading out were delayed, but it didn’t impact my schedule all that much. On each one I was offered not only a beverage but snacks as well (pretzels, peanuts and cookies). American stopped offering snacks in coach a long time ago, but you can buy them on some flights.

I’m not sure if this is typical of all Delta flights, and it wasn’t so amazing that I will be switching any time soon, but I won’t have a problem choosing Delta should I have to in the future. This month I will pass 1.6 million lifetime miles on AA, and since 2 million gets me lifetime Platinum status it is a goal I want to reach.

After that, who knows. Maybe I’ll switch.

Airlock from The M.H.A.

Posted on by tarus

I’m a bit of a security junky. I don’t transmit any passwords in the clear if I can help it. I use virtual credit card numbers whenever possible. And I set my screen saver to lock with a password after three minutes of inactivity.

Three minutes may seem a little short, but I used to work in an environment in which leaving your laptop unattended resulted in some unpleasant practical jokes. My hard drive is encrypted so I’m not worried about the theft of my laptop resulting in the loss of private information, but that doesn’t work if I just leave my laptop laying around logged in.

So I am extremely happy to have come across Airlock by The M.H.A. You install this app as a preference pane on your laptop and it uses bluetooth to pair with your iPhone or iPod touch.

Simply walk away from your laptop with the phone (or iPod) in your pocket and your laptop will automatically lock. Come back into range and it automatically unlocks.

Version 1.0.0 didn’t work with my iPhone 3GS but the 1.0.1 version released today works fine. Free three hour demo mode (infinitely renewable) and only US$7.77 to purchase.

So far I really like it.

And the Winner Is …

Posted on by tarus

Okay, for many, many months now I have been agonizing over getting a new phone. My trusty LG Fusic on Sprint (now for sale on eBay) has been with me for over 3 years, and with the advent of all the new smartphone options available I wanted something a little more versatile.

I live out in the woods of North Carolina, and wireless phone coverage is iffy at best. Sprint seems to have the best service (which is why I’ve used them since 1998) but it is only best because the other major players have closer to no coverage.

However, over the last year everyone but AT&T introduced a femtocell product. This is a small device that plugs into your broadband internet connection and instead of making calls over a cell tower, it acts like a bridge between your phone and the network. It’s like having a cell tower in your house. This has opened up some options for me.

Unlike many people, I was pretty happy with Sprint. They have a good network and as long as you don’t ever, ever, have to talk with customer service you’ll probably be happy with them. The downside is that they rarely have cool phones.

Verizon has the best network overall, while AT&T is oversubscribed and T-mobile is a newcomer to the North Carolina market, but the latter run on GSM networks which means your phone will work practically anywhere. I travel enough overseas that this is a consideration.

In my hunt for a new phone I narrowed it down to the following choices:

  • Sprint and the Palm Pre: The Pre was the first exciting phone to hit the Sprint network in years. I seriously considered it until I realized that it was pretty much dead on arrival. The issues they experienced when trying to create a developer community didn’t help much either.
  • Sprint and the HTC Hero: This is the best phone Sprint has right now. It’s designed well, exciting and powered by Android. The main issue holding me back from this phone was the lack of synchronization between the desktop and the phone for things like contacts. Sure, you can sync through Google, but as much as I like Google I don’t want to host that kind of information on a third-party server. There may be an app to address my sync issues, but the Android Market website is so weak that you can’t browse all of the apps. It says “For a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the thousands of titles that are available, you will need to view Android Market on a handset.” This isn’t possible if I don’t have a handset, and I won’t get a handset unless I know that basic synchronization is available. (sigh) Kris Buytaert seems to like his, though.
  • Verizon and the Blackberry Storm: A friend of mine has one of these and loves it. The first generation came without Wi-Fi, but that has been corrected. It also supports both CDMA and GSM, so you can use it overseas. The downside is that it is a proprietary platform. Not a show stopper, but a negative.
  • AT&T and the Apple iPhone: I use a Mac as my desktop and I have an iPod Touch, so the iPhone is definitely a contender. Although it is a closed platform, we do develop some apps on it in house, so I am a little bit familiar with the hoops you have to jump through. It is GSM, so I could use it anywhere and almost everyone else at the office has one and likes it. The problem is almost no service where I live.
  • Verizon and the Droid: This is the Android phone I’d been waiting for. A full featured Android phone on a great network. But the more I read about it, the more disappointed I became. I was told that the version offered in the US would not support GSM. When I got into examining Verizon’s pricing structure, it seems like they nickel and dime you for everything. Plus the fact that their “unlimited” plan is limited to 5GB a month, with additional traffic costing $50 per GB, made me hesitate. I mean, I think 5GB is a lot, but I really don’t know, and I’d hate to get hit with that fee.

So, the day before the Droid launch I was a little disappointed. While no GSM is not a deal-breaker, the fact that I wasn’t sure I could sync my contacts, coupled with the exceedingly high prices Verizon charges, had me thinking about waiting a few months more.

But then I found out that AT&T’s femtocell offering (the 3G Microcell) had just become available in my area. So I am now the owner of a 32GB iPhone 3GS, replacing my iPod Touch and Fusic.

The Microcell meant that I could get AT&T service at my house. At $150, it was a full $100 off of the price of the Verizon solution, and with the plan I got it included another $100 rebate, making it even cheaper than Sprint’s $100 Airave (which requires an additional $5 per month as well as using minutes). With AT&T I got the lowest minute plan at 700 minutes per month, but for $20/month extra I get unlimited calls on the Microcell. With rollover minutes I don’t think I’ll ever run out, since I make a lot of calls from home.

The Microcell installed pretty easily. It requires a GPS signal so that they know you aren’t using it overseas (where the roaming revenue lives) and thus you have to have it near a window, but since I have skylights in my living room (as well as an Ethernet switch) it was simple to install. It took it about 20 minutes to become active.

The Microcell is Cisco-branded, and I thought it was interesting that it included a disk full of copies of the GPL and other licenses (but no source code) for a number of common GNU/Linux software. I wonder how hackable the Microcell will be? A nmap scan shows that it only responds to ping, so I’m not sure there is a way to get into it over the network.

There are a few downsides. One was that my Sony Ericsson K610i phone (a gift from Alex Hoogerhuis), while 3G, wouldn’t connect to the Microcell (although it connected to AT&T’s network just fine). I don’t know if it was because the phone is unlocked or just because AT&T’s 3G isn’t necessarily the rest of the world’s 3G. So I ended up getting my wife a Sony Ericsson W518a instead, and it connected just fine.

The second was that Embarq had their quarterly DSL outage just after I got everything set up. Without broadband the Microcell is useless, so I was back to one bar (if that). Everything was back up in about 2 hours so I shouldn’t have to worry about it again for another few months.

As for the iPhone – I like it. I knew pretty much what I was getting into since I had a Touch. Since it now supports the bluetooth A2DP protocol I can stream music over FM using the MotoRokr T505 in my car. The voice control is pretty cool (just say “Play Songs by Spoon” and voilà) but it had a lot of trouble with voice dialing. I think it had something to do with the 1300+ contacts I had in my address book. An hour or so spent pruning it down to 300 (I had several dead people listed, for example, plus a number of ex-employers personnel lists) seems to have helped. The camera is crappier than I thought it would be, but the reviews of the Droid camera aren’t much better.

I expect my next phone to be powered by Android, but that is at least 2 years away. A friend of mine just bought a Droid and he’s also an iPhone user, so I look forward to his review.

Anyway, being on the ‘net almost everywhere I go is a little addicting, and I’m on the lookout for must-have iPhone apps. Please send along any suggestions.

World of Cheese

Posted on by tarus

I’m a geek. Always have been, it seems. I got my first computer in 1978 when I was 12 years old (a TRS-80) and haven’t looked back.

In the highest levels of the geek pantheon you’ll find the actor John Cleese. He was one of the more cerebral cast members of Monty Python and his humour seems to resonate with us. I find it hard to believe that he’ll be 70 this year (a month older than my father) but then again I find it hard to believe I’ll be 44 soon.

I can’t help but think that John is also a geek. While I don’t think he runs around buying the latest technology for himself (more on that a bit later), he does embrace it. One of the first games I bought for my 386 PC back in the day was a Monty Python multimedia software package (before the term multimedia was mainstream) that included games, pictures, screen savers and it animated your desktop (it was called Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time and was released in 1994).

So here is this guy, almost 70, and he’s still pushing the technology envelope. He’s on Twitter and has numerous web pages, including one called Headcast. Headcast is being revamped, although to get access to the new site you’ll need to sign up for John Cleese’s Nigerian Lottery, which he appears to only be marketing through Twitter.

On the new website you’ll find news, merchandise and be able to download 20-30 minute videos for US$2.50. You order through Paypal and then you get a link to download the video. The reason I didn’t post the URL to the new site is that I had problems with the download on my Mac via Safari. While the file seemed to download fine it was corrupted and wouldn’t play (one of John’s minions got me sorted via Vimeo). They should have everything working by the official launch.

What does this have to do with open source and OpenNMS? Open source is a disrupter in that the normal methods of software development and sales have been turned on their head. In much the same way, the entertainment industry is going through a similar change.

Movies are no longer the same since many people can afford large flat screen televisions and high end sound systems at home, so the desire to go out, brave sticky floors and sit shoulder to shoulder with loud, smelly people in a theatre is lessened. Even television shows are time shifted and people fast forward through the commercials. I don’t think the demand for good video entertainment is going away, but the revenue model is going to have to change.

Instead of complaining about it, you have people like Cleese who embrace change and come up with ways to profit from it.

For example: I follow John on Twitter. He tweeted about his Nigerian Lottery. I signed up. I got a link to the new Headcast site and downloaded World of Cheese. He got $2.50, and I bet his cut is much higher than he gets from a movie ticket. I got a somewhat exclusive John Cleese video. All of these technologies coming together to entertain me and compensate the content creator. Brilliant.

That long setup was simply there to preface my review of World of Cheese.

According to Wikipedia, Cleese was going through a divorce last year, and apparently this found him sequestered in a Covent Garden, London, hotel room. I’m assuming this video was shot during that time. The first 15 minutes consist of a rather intimate look around the room while John riffs on curtains, hotels in general and coffee. The last few minutes touch on irrationality, the holographic nature of the universe and jigsaw puzzles.

As someone who spends a lot of time in hotel rooms (over 60 nights last year) I could really understand his frustration. I can remember being in a hotel in Japan where I couldn’t figure out the air conditioning unit, even after I took a picture of it and asked my hosts to translate.

He didn’t discuss my favorite hotel topic: shower controls. You would be amazed by the differences in the knobs and buttons that control the water in hotel showers around the world. Besides your basic one knob/two knob choice, there are hundreds of combinations. Being the experienced traveler I am, I have it down to a science.

Recently I stepped into a shower and quickly sized up the situation: ah, the single knob, pull to start, rotate for temp model. Piece of cake. I pulled it out to find that housekeeping had left the little button in that turns “fill the tub” into “shower”. It usually pops out on its own, but for some reason this one didn’t. This meant that instead of the freezing cold water coming out of the spigot, it came out of the shower head to spray my unprotected, naked body (yeah, I know, thanks for that mental image).

What’s funny in this situation is that my breathing became one way. I immediately inhaled (“gasped” is a better word) but was too cold to exhale, so I inhaled again – kind of a “hnuaggggh, hnuaggggh, hnuaggggh” sound. Eventually the water warmed enough to thaw me out and restore my breathing before I could pass out.

While I visit hotel rooms, Cleese had to live in his, so there was a lot more stuff than I usually have. There was a large number of books, a stack of newspapers, and a rather amazing collection of wine (at least for a hotel room). He makes coffee using nothing but a large funnel and a coffee filter. His shower contained two large bottles versus the stupid 3oz ones I have to carry on the plane, and it’s kind of fun to look around as he talks to see what other things he brought with him. This isn’t the Minister of Funny Walks or Basil Fawlty, this is a moment from John Cleese’s life as he actually lived it, and I think it provides some insight into the man himself.

So if you are a fan of his type of humour and of John Cleese, go buy World of Cheese. If nothing else you’ll be contributing to the Cleese Alimony Fund (not tax deductible, unfortunately) as well as validating the business model.

NOTE: In researching this post, I came across johncleese.com. Awesome. Fans will remember Edmund Wells as the author of such classics as Grate Expectations in the Python Bookshop sketch.

UPDATE: the new http://headcast.co.uk/ site is up.