XP Mysteries Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts about weird Windows XP stuff that I never could figure out - occasionally with explanations, workarounds or solutions.

The first item I'd like to mention is why copying your Windows installation from one disk to another is always so problematic. Why is it I apparently need to by some expensive sector by sector disk copying program to do this? And why is it that even they fail when your source and destination disks are different sizes?

Before I knew better I would use Acronis MigrateEasy to copy stuff - it is a sector by sector disk copier, cost $$, could handle different sized source and destination disks but would often fail if you copying to or from an external (USB/Firewire) drive and it didn't recognize it.

Once I got into Linux the solution that I used until recently was use a wonderful standalone bootable Linux image called 'GParted LiveCD'. It not only copies partitions from one place to another, it could do crazy stuff like move and resize NTFS partitions. Another bonus is it is completely free and is fast.

Then I recently came across, by accident, a wonderful Windows utility called XXClone that achieves the seemingly impossible - copies your C: drive from one place to another and makes that other place bootable. And you can run it while you're running Windows and it works - or it least it has for me so far. Because it does a file by file copy it is oblivious to differences in disk sizes - so long as the target has as much space as the source, and as a side effect it defrags your disk - something that might normally take Windows as long or longer than the entire XXClone disk copy. Finally if you want to hand over $40 then you can get the non-free version that does incremental copy and scheduled copy - basically a backup. This gives you a "hot" copy of your system disk you can boot from if the first goes bad. Yes, there will be some limitations with open files (because it doesn't use volume shadow copy), loss of system restore info - but in my experience 90% of the time, if not more for home and most desktop system use, that is irrelevant.

The economics of open source

I'm sure papers have been written on this but I just had a realization that why I fundamentally like the concept of open source software is that it is basically about sharing and I like the concept of sharing.

Let me give you an example - I just solved a router configuration problem, granted it was a small problem, but by finding a solution probably saved me a couple of hours or more of trying to reconfigure my router from scratch, hoping I could remember every setting I'd previously applied. I tried Googling for an answer first but couldn't find anything but lots of other people posting about the exact same problem I was having and they were pissed-off just like me. As best I can tell they all resorted to the long road and were not happy, mostly at the router manufacturer - DLink.

So after solving my problem I went ahead and posted my solution on Broadband Reports which has a forum specifically for DIR-655. By the way - it is a really great forum for getting network advice of all kinds, lots of really smart people hang out on it. I hope my posting helps other people - I know DLink support read that forum so hopefully they will incorporate the solution I found into their future firmware releases.

All this got me thinking - sharing a solution to a problem is basically the spirit of "open source" - share the instructions of your problem solutions be they steps to take or scripts or other source code. In this case I also shared how I arrived at the solution, in this case some lateral thinking, so I also provided possible solution to future unknown problems - a meta solution.

So this got me thinking about open source and sharing and how so many problems are getting solved and solved quickly these days thanks to sharing of knowledge via Google. All this either just wasn't possible before widely accessible information sharing repositories became available on the Internet. Instead you'd have to go to your library and hope someone had written a solution to the problem, probably years before and there was a book with it available. Or you could write in to a magazine and wait and hope there is someone out there who had already found a solution, possibly taking months. Or you might have to pay some expert who had the knowledge to reveal it to you - or to go find a solution for you probably doing the exact same thing as you would have done, fingers crossed...

All those processes are slow, inefficient and would quite often be fruitless because the information just wasn't out there - posting information or source code online is easy and takes minutes, writing to a magazine or writing a book is a whole different undertaking!

So I'm thinking how much better open source is because it doesn't seek to monetize actual knowledge - by sharing knowledge freely we all get to pull each other up by each others bootstraps and avoid duplication of effort and squandering lives that are spent in ignorance of already solved problems. Doesn't that seem to be a better economic proposition than everyone closely guarding their knowledge, like lords sitting atop of their heavily armored castles trying to repel invaders and keep their fiefdom under their thumbs by force and ignorance?

Sure the downside is we don't get to solely benefit from our intellectual endeavors, but the upside is we get to benefit from the collective endeavors of everyone else. What single person can honestly say the upside in that equation could out weigh the downside for them? And in rejecting that premise aren't they effectively saying that the compensation they will receive for access to their private endeavors will exceed what they have to pay for access to everyone else's? Can that really be true, and if it is doesn't it really outrageously overvalue that individual's contributions? Or am I just in danger of becoming a raging socialist, Marxist or what ever ?-ist might best match my rambling thesis (because I'm sure it is not new thinking).

Databases are history

I don't like databases, I never have - they've always seemed like glorified spreadsheets with their own arcane "programming language" if you can call it that. So when I read this eweek article on developing languages for parallel processing the most interesting comment was not about parallel processing at all, it was Gosling's comment on databases.

"the real notion of what will change is databases. I say data structure, not database. Why do you want to use a database? Just use RAM. With the machines we make, you can put half a terabyte of RAM on them. And you don't use databases, you use RAM and things run like the wind."

I always like Gosling, now I've found a whole new level of respect for him. I mean the man really has a point - how much money does even a modest sized business spend on database technology, infrastructure and support these days? Convert even a fraction of that into memory sticks and you get a whopping amount of RAM storage.

I know that is a simplification since you have to keep that memory, and the system running it alive and non-corrupted at all times but such things are really not much harder than keeping a database file system non-corrupted and backed up correctly. Different yes, but harder no.

Therefore thanks to Gosling's comment I'm now looking forward to the year 1 ADB - that's 1 After DataBasess.

Groaning Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10 disappoints

After my previous post last night I spent a few more hours (yes hours!) playing with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10. I discovered that it is far less stable on my machine than I'd hoped and thus far the new features have underwhelmed me compared to the loss of functionality it has brought - hence there has been some considerable groaning from me as wart after wart appears (I know Warty Warthog was a much older release).

I discovered that the black (or blank) screen of death I'd been experiencing happens whenever I log out. After much searching around I discovered that other people had been getting this problem with Feisty months ago but it was a new one to me. There were a few suggested fixes - from changing the Gnome gconf file to always restart the XServer after logging out, to switching to a different graphics drive, and to disabling compiz screen effect. I tried all three and only disabling screen effects seemed to cure the problem. I still see the black screen problem on occasion so I'm assuming there is some bug in the "Experimental Intel mode-switching driver" the default install gave me. But I don't want to move back to the i810 driver because that doesn't recognize my i855GM adapter and hence I get ugly 1024x768 instead of 1280x800 resolution. That can be fixed with an hack - one that I used with Feisty but apparently that doesn't work Gutsy and I don't have the time to play with it.

Then I discovered that Suspend mode is problematic - it either doesn't work at all, taking me to the black screen of death, or when it recovers the screen is all messed up and I have to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get back, thus logging myself out and losing all work in process, rather defeats the point. So I tried Hibernate and started to find that is not 100% reliable either and when it does come back from Hibernate my network doesn't work because the NetworkManager process seems to have gone wild eating up all the CPU. I have to kill it and then start another from the command line. Sigh.

And the network manager continues to not do it for me - in my building I see about 30 or more WiFi networks, trying to pick mine from a scrolling menu with no search short cuts is just a big pain - as it was in Fesity. I was really hoping they would have fixed this for the better.

Also on the networking front it seems that compatibility with Windows networking is still big pain in the butt to set up. I noticed during the installation they went out of their way to try and migrate Windows user files, so how about making Ubuntu Samba/WINS friendly out of the box - or at least a one click configuration. As it is I'm still stuck trying to figure out/remember the hoops I have to jump through to be able to ping my Windows hosts by name and browse the Windows network because it sure doesn't work out of the box.

What else - well suppose I did want to try the desktop effects - I've no idea what all the keyboard accelerators are or how to configure them to my liking. I had it pretty much down with the optional Compiz install + Berly. But in Gutsy apparently there is some missing advanced configuration - an Advanced button under System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects. I've seen other people say use it to configure compiz-fusion, and a whole bunch more say "No I don't have it", some more say you have to install a settings manager, and others saying that wont install with Gutsy. Oh well. Since I did a clean install I've no idea what is going on...

So between video problems, suspend/hibernate problems, and network problems I haven't really been that impressed. I guess its just my luck to be using an older laptop but really since it was working pretty much fine with Feisty these issues really look like regressions to me.

UPDATE: I tried apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager and it worked for me and I now have a "Preferences" button on the Visual Effects tab. I suspect that those who had it fail probably did upgrades or already had pre-Gutsy Compiz packages install that conflict with the new compiz-fusion stuff.

Galavanting towards Gutsy Gibbon

When Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" came out I had already been using it for well over a month. I'd been riding the betas since they started and watching it get better and better. So when it finally went "Final" it was somewhat of an anti-climax. This time around I've been somewhat more cautious - I did a trial upgrade to the beta on my laptop about a month ago, but didn't notice huge changes. Since then every time I pressed the update button it would complain about a partial upgrade and try to reinstall 500 updates - something which I never did bother to find the cure for.

Hence my laptop has been languishing in Linux limbo land - mostly booting into Windows XP - and my desktop at work has stayed firmly with Feisty Fawn. But just now, a day before the final release images are due I Bit Torrented an install disk, blew away my old Feisty partitions and installed 7.10 Release Candidate from scratch. I decided to do a clean install mostly because I knew I'd loaded up a lot of experimental stuff on Feisty trying to get various hardware devices on my Dell Inspiron 700m working (the modem and SD-Card reader - with no luck). Since most of my files are online or on a file server at home I know I could blow stuff away and not lose any data so it would save me a lot of time.

As I wiped my old / partition while running in Live mode there was a disconcerting crash report message - I didn't figure out what it was, gparted I assume... Then during the install just at the end there was a message about not being able to unmount a /mnt/ partition. I closed an open application (I'd been browsing with Firefox during the install) and told it to continue and the install completed successfully as best I could tell. After telling it to restart my system it duly ejected the CD I'd burned and then went to a black screen. I wasn't sure if that was the plan - I was expecting it to reboot, but after a few minutes waiting it didn't so a Ctrl-Alt-Del did the trick.

On rebooting I was pleased that I didn't have to do a thing to get the display working properly in 1280x800 mode - something that took a tweak or two last time around. I was also pleased that pretty much everything seems to be working fine although I wasn't expecting to get an immediate prompt about 93 updates, apparently before I'd even connected the network. When I looked on line the Ubuntu site said there were "00" days before 7.10 was available but I didn't see any final release images available yet - the only downloads were for a beta. But I assumed that the final release package versions had probably hit the repositories. Either way I clicked the button and let the updates churn...

After what seemed longer than it took to do the original install all the updates were downloaded and installed with no glitches and it was time to restart once more... Unfortunately it once again failed to shutdown leaving the screen black, the machine on and unresponsive even to Ctrl-Alt-Del. So I had to press and hold the power switch which duly rebooted the machine.

However after rebooting I was happy that I was able to install a software modem driver via the restricted drivers utility, something that had eluded me with Feisty. It was interesting that the restricted driver manager asked me to insert the Ubuntu install disk again to get the driver - that is reminiscent of Windows - wouldn't it be better to just look for it on the net as is standard with Synaptic? Anyway the driver installed just fine but I've yet to test it - realistically I almost never user a dial up modem any more since I nearly always use WiFi or plug my computer into my phone, something that also never worked for me with Feisty.

I was even more delighted when I plugged in an SD Card and it was recognized right away with an offer to import photos from it - again something that completely failed to work for me due to lack of support for my Inspiron 700m's SD-Card reader. Since I usually take my laptop with me on vacation to upload photos from my camera it was really a pain that I couldn't rely on Ubuntu to do that - now there is no excuse and I may finally even have to learn GIMP to ween myself off Photoshop.

Next I decided to try the new screen management feature and see if I could get my laptop working properly with an external display - something which I could only do before with a manual edit or swap of the xorg.conf file and gdm restart. Firstly I noticed that while the applet showed two screens it would only let me enable one at a time. It also had selected an "experimental mode-swapping Intel driver" - when I changed that to the Intel i8x driver it correctly allowed me to select both displays to be active with appropriate display cloning and extension options. So I went for it - selecting the #2 display as a generic 1280x1024 LCD panel. It then told me I'd have to log all users out so I logged out and boom - I'm back to black. Once again I could not revive the system - and no, no TTY session was available either. So I had to reboot with the power switch and of course when it reboots I get no graphics session and no nice message to indicate what happened. After a couple of efforts at reverting the xorg.conf file (xorg.conf.failsafe didn't work) I get back to what I had before.

So next time I try to just plug in some sane value for monitor 2 type and resolution without changing the driver and without actually enabling it. What do you know it still craps out on me and I'm left with a display in 640x480 mode. I can't figure out how to undo the change I made - it just keeps showing the resolution as 640x480 and that is that. So I revert xorg.conf by hand again (I'm surprised there is no "revert" button in the management applet) and restart GDM with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Thankfully I get back to 1280x800 on the laptop display and I decide to leave it at that for now... This wasn't a high priority for me and I figure someone will work out what to do sooner or later.

After finishing with trying to get multiple displays to work I think decided to restart the machine again. This time I'm happy to report it did it just fine and I can also say that 7.10 shutdown and boot times are much improved over Feisty. I'd swear I can reboot back to the login prompt in 30 seconds or less (but I really need to time it).

So, that's my first hour or so of playing around - mostly good, a few warts but nothing unsurmountable. I will update with new observations and progress with the multi-monitor problem as I have news.

Full bare-metal VM

Earlier this year when I was researching business ideas I spent quite a while looking at virtual machine technologies. Having used them for a couple of years I was somewhat (but definitely not a lot) ahead of the curve. It was clear to me that VMs are cool, useful and the way things will be in the future. The two main trends that occured to me were that:

a) all applications would eventually be delivered as virtual machines. This is the logical extension of the long running saga of desktop application virtualization via Java, .NET and now via the web container and remote HTML spewing connections (AJAX, Comet et al) to other VMs.

b) as a consequence of a) the desktop OS you run will eventually become irrelevant. You'll either be running apps that are inherently cross platform or are not but are delivered inside a single application licensed OS instance e.g. Windows running Word or Windows running Photoshop - and nothing else. You'll run it on your own VM host along with a whole bunch of other VM encapsulated applications.

Thanks to Open Source and the burgeoning Linux market there is already tremendous cross platform support for many applications - only the deeply entrenched app providers like Microsoft, Adobe and a few others are holding things back (and there are signs that even Adobe is weakening - probably to try and stave off the threat of people who skip right over the bother of learning Photoshop or Premier to other Open Source alternatives).

The corollary of b) is that if your host OS doesn't matter and all you are doing is running client OS encapsulated applications then the host OS could really be anything that can run a VM container. It could be very thing indeed - a very lean Linux or a stripped down embedded OS even - just whatever it takes to run the VM container. A company like VMWare is ideally suited to figure out what that functionality is and it is logical that the eventually start shipping such a system already built into hardware via firmware.

As it turns out I just heard about a company DeviceVM that is doing just that with one of the latest Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboards. Their system is called Splashtop which lets you boot very quickly to a minimal system containing a browser and few applications. Given their company name it sounds very like they are running a VM image - my guess is they are actually booting a Xen enabled stripped down Linux instead of BIOS which then loads a virtual machine image from disk - this is similar to some of them operating system on a stick systems where you boot from the USB device which has a generic Linux on it that will run on just about any hardware and then boots your real OS as a VM. With the free availability of VMWare Server thats something that almost anyone can put together albeit with considerably reduced performance (I've run VMWare Server off a 4GB USB drive and its SLOW).

I'll be interested to see where Splashtop goes - I think its biggest potential probably lies in the appliance market where gaming, multimedia and other homedevices can basically be sold as some hardware and a VM image. Microsoft, if they were forward thinking enough, should also realize that licensing Windows to run as a guest OS executing a single application could get them serious amounts of revenue. Even if they only eek out say $10 per unit just think of how many Apple and even Linux users would be queuing up to get their favorite Windows app or two - but not the whole bare OS - running on their OS of choice.

This model of using apps may sound funky but believe me it works - it is exactly like remote desktoping into a Windows Server machine where your account has been locked to run only one application. It is also very similar to pulling up a browser to run a Web 2.0 application - the only difference there is you are much more dependent on remote network access speed. Local virtualized applications just don't have that problem which means the era of the extremely hard to develop and maintain, not to mention increasingly insecure web application is almost over. Fat clients will be back but they will be completely encapsulated clients downloadble a incremental VM images. Furthermore, for the application producer the benefits are enormous and could finally make application development and testing on an increasingly diverse OS base relatively easy again...

And as I originally said, all this means which OS you run on your machine - if you even care or know - will be irrelevant to the user and application developer. That's exactly the way it should be and everything that Java tried to be as a virtual machine and failed (although I still think it and .NET are great development languages and have done wonderful things for the software development world).

Roll on full bare-metal VMs!

Car alarms done right

Last night I was woken up at 4:05am by some silenced vehicle roaring at high speed down our street running every stop sign there is. If that wasn't enough it set off car alarms in its wake and we had to listen to the one right across the street blaring away for two minutes.

To the Porsche Boxter owner across the street - we hate your car alarm. You set it off almost daily and if someone was stealing it no one would notice or probably give a damn because at this point we'd probably rather your car was in a ditch somewhere than setting its alarm off all the time on our street. Dude you have a garage space - park it there.

The only thing we hate more than your car alarm is your house alarm the bleeps at 100 db every time you open your bleeping door which is about 20 times a day as you go for smoke breaks. It is audible outside over a block away and a half block away inside - no one, and I mean no one, needs to hear that.

So as you can tell I'm down on audible alarm systems - the technology to make them redundant has been there for years and the only person who needs to hear them is the owner. Get one that rings your phone or sounds an alarm in your house or pocket wirelessly. Better still get a new fangled OnStar remote car disabler as featured today on Engadget

The only thing wrong with the OnStar system that I can see is that they will be too popular - I hope that OnStar have done some deal with a third party to track down these vehicles when they are being remotely disabled. Cops in our City don't have time to be wasting on mere property crimes - murders, shootings and the like come first. Insurance companies, car companies and owners should be subsidizing the recovery efforts, not the city police departments. Of course I forget, how silly of me, it is good for the economy for vehicles to be stolen, wrecked and written off because of all the new car sales it generates, all the insurance jobs it creates, and all the inflated body shop dollars it pumps into the system.

Comcast customer gives new kind of feedback

I have a neighbor in my building who had a hell of a time getting Comcast to fix their service to the building. After years of them screwing around with a musical chairs game of connections and pissing off one customer at a time he finally made it his business to get them to do their business. It took calls all the way up to VP level and almost a year of waiting before the finally installed extra cables to the building that would give everyone sufficient signal strength. The funny thing was he'd long since given up waiting and switched to DSL for his network but he still kept on bugging them to do the work.

Having heard him speak about dealing with Comcast for years I think I know how this 75 year old woman felt when she took a hammer into a Comcast office and started smashing up customer rep equipment. I think it is great that she didn't care there would probably be criminal charges resulting from the outburst - I mean she is 75 so there is probably not much to lose in it for her. I'm left wondering what will happen to her service now - will they disconnect her? Continue with the crappy service? Or will she become some customer advocate hero and they'll be forced to compensate her? Or will she just languish in jail and be slammed with civil suits from the employee who's computer she smashed up?

For years now mailmen and employees have "gone postal", now I guess we'll have to watch out for customers "gone Comcastic".

Free the musicians...

News that some artists (like Nine Inch Nails) have completely freed themselves of music business contracts doesn't surprise me. It makes me think "What took you so long?". I look forward to these more successful bands who can take the luxury to go "contract free" innovating and pushing the envelope. I think it wont be long before they are able to make an impact on music pricing by talking directly to companies like Apple to set far more favorable per-track prices on music. Or there is the Radiohead approach where they sell directly to the consumer.

Not that I think middle men in the music business have no role at all - like government subsidies and TV channel bundling on cable there is some case to be made that they help small bands get a jump start. But those arguments may only apply in today's closed and proprietary music business where you absolutely need a jump start, to "be discovered" as it where. Without some folks in a fancy LA office deciding to turn their marketing dollar laser on you you'll just get lost in noise. In a new consumer driven market that may not be necessary at all - all you need to be successful is good music and a bit of time to grow your market organically exploiting the viral "meme" nature of consumers.

Stay tuned...

Meraki mucks up the mesh

Apparently Mesh Network provider Meraki has managed to piss off a lot of it's users by jacking up rates without warning. "Standard" consumer versions seem to be the same price - with ads injected to compensate - and "Pro" versions get a $100 price bump (that's a 200% increase from $50). So many people who were planning on using Meraki to roll out networks for buildings and needed the billing features of "Pro" are now stuck, especially if they are in the middle of a deployment.

This is a shame, especially for the bad publicity it seems to be generating. However overall I think for a commercially backed product it is still a good deal - those trying to use other hardware will probably find themselves looking at hundreds of dollars per node. But I wouldn't be surprised if it is long before some mesh features start appearing in the Open Source router software configurations - such as OpenWRT - which have long been innovating in adding advanced access point and router features to off the shelf hardware from makers like Linksys and Buffalo.

Rubik's Cube redeployed

I was once told (I can't remember who buy) that the sign of a really good software application was that it could be used in significantly different ways beyond what the original creator anticipated. The example given was using the spreadsheet to plot graphs - this was long before spreadsheets had a graphing feature built in. No, it was done by putting the right kind of formula that would display graphics (i.e. characters) depending on the data. The result was crude ASCII art type bar charts, but they worked.

So this Wooster Collective post about art being created with the Rubik's Cube rocks my world. I love it's retro cubist (pun intended) looks.

A twisty maze of web forms

A while back I signed up for a free basic account with Microsoft Office Live. I did it so I could test out the functionality and see if it would work for a small business I do some IT consulting for. Initially I was hopeful, but after a while I realized that the web user interface was really just bad. It was really typically of a pre-web 2.0 interface trying to do the most it could to be like a "real" application but ultimately failing.

Part of creating that account was that I had to register a domain so I picked a name I'd been contemplating the registration of but couldn't be bothered to add another $10 a year to actually do it. Since the basic account with Office Live gave free registration too it was a no brainer. However the consequence was my domain ended up being registered with a company called MelbourneIT down under. Now I'm sure they are big in Australia and there abouts, but I'd certainly never heard of them. I got to wondering what would ever happen if I wanted to get the domain away from them.

So last week I decided it was time to cancel my Office Live account and reclaim my domain. To cut a long story short lets just say it was "difficult". In fact, even as a seasoned IT veteran I would say it was one of the most complicated and arduous transfers of a domain I've yet to experience and I'm actually still waiting because MelbourneIT actually wont do a transfer until a 4 day period has expired - they sent me a confirmation email that the transfer had been requested but during that 4 day period my only option is to cancel the transfer, there is no option to confirm the transfer and get it over with. So I have to wait...

Before that it took me a long time to figure, well actually guess, that I had to just terminate my Office Live account to get the process under way. Doing that took several non-intuitive steps including going to an unrelated web site to request termination. After that I eventually got an email from Microsoft saying they had examined my request and deemed it okay. Then there was information about how to go to MelbourneIT and create an account and manage my domain from there. They were giving me 90 days free registration after the cancellation which I think is lucky because if I was a lessor or less patient mortal I would have required every days worth.

It then took me an hour or more to figure out how to associate my newly dissociated Office Live domain with a newly created MelbourneIT account. Then I had to unlock it, find the link to get a domain transfer key and initiated a transfer from my usual hosting company DreamHost. The first time around that failed because the contact details for my domain were wrong and the email went to the wrong place. I had to cancel the transfer, correct the contact details and wait for MelbourneIT to push the updates to Internic.net so DreamHost would see them. That took another day to happen and finally the destination registrar side of things went smoothly although I had to wait another half a day to get any confirmation from MelbourneIT that they had received the transfer request. Then I got that nasty "if you want to cancel click here - otherwise wait four days" email. I feel like after all this effort I'm now being treated like a potential felon buying a handgun...

So lets just say I wont be registering any more domains via Office Live any time soon. I'm looking forward to getting all my eggs back in one basket!

Gizmo - mo better VoIP for your mobile

I never did post part 2 of my VoIP posting. Suffice to say I found a good VoIP solution called Gizmo and have been using it quite heavily for several months now. Actually the VoIP connectivity is provided by a company called SipPhone - you can sign up with them independently of Gizmo. Gizmo is actually an open source project to provide clients and services layered on top of VoIP and you can use any SIP based VoIP provider, not just SipPhone.

The Gizmo client works well and is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows. It also talks to most of the IM providers too like Yahoo, MSN and Google, and they area also about to add video support (currently in beta on Windows).

The latest innovation to come from GizmoProject is Gizmo for your mobile phone. Now this does what you're thinking - lets you place VoIP calls from your mobile, but not how you think it would. It is not a VoIP client, it is actually a little Java (J2ME) application that runs on your phone and it makes a call from your cellphone to a remote number in an interesting way...

It actually takes your mobile phone number and the number you want to call and initiates two VoIP calls from a remote server - one to your mobile, and the other to the number you want to dial, and then it connects them together. Both ends get an incoming call that look like they are from your cellphone and you're both connected to each other... The clever part is you end up paying standard Gizmo rates for the call to your mobile from the USA and the call to the other end (you are also liable for any cellphone airtime minutes charged for receiving the call).

This may not sound very useful but it is - it means you can make international calls from cellphone for a pitance. For instance if I want to call the UK then normally T-Mobile would charge me $1.00 or more a minute - if I use Gizmo for Mobile then I end up paying 1.95 cents a minute for the call to me, and 1.95 cents for the call to the UK for a total of 3.9 cents a minute. Assuming I'm within my cellphone plan minutes allotment there is no airtime charge to pay T-Mobile. Brilliant!

Because the application is J2ME based it runs on a very wide variety of phones and requires very little resources unlike standard VoIP clients. So you don't need a fancy Windows Mobile or other smartphone to use it - any J2ME supporting phone (which is nearly all these days) will run it. You will also have to have a cellphone plan that lets J2ME apps access the Internet - usually called a "Web access" plan or something like that. But since it transfers very little data that shouldn't cost much if anything. It is well worth it if you are going to make any International calls.

Now all I want is the ability to do the same thing from a web browser to my regular land line. I know there are other ways to achieve the same thing - by calling an access number to make a VoIP call, but kicking off the call from a regular web browser would be much cooler and would avoid any outgoing charges.

He aint heavy, he's my laptop

Excuse me, but when did four pounds not including battery become "pretty light" for a laptop? My current laptop is under four pounds without battery and barely over with the extended battery and it is over two years old to boot. So shouldn't a state of the art laptop be less than four pounds with battery if it is to be classified "pretty light"???

My only conclusion is that a spate of monster arm breaking laptops with 17 inch screens and masses to match has warped our sense of what is or is not "pretty light".

I know, I know, I know...

I know why this blog doesn't get a lot of hits - for one I don't post very often and for two when I do it's loooooooooong ass posts that few people even get through. Well shocker, the two are related- I seldom feel like posting a short three liner is worth it. However that seems to be what people want. Short, sharp, shock - dig it?

Okay, I dig it! So here they come...

Shocker - eBay decides Skype NOT worth how much?

I can't say I'm at all surprised to hear that eBay has decided Skype wasn't exactly worth the $2.4 billion it paid for it two years ago. You don't say - I just wish some of these guys would come talk to me because if I could get just one penny for every dollar I save them I'd be more than happy.

I mean just what were they thinking? Everyone and his cat knows that while VoIP is very cool it is also notoriously hard to substitute for the phone - even I, a relative tech god in the tech world, had to get a new fancy VoIP aware router, mess with firewalls and do all kinds of tricks to get it working well. And those who know their stuff know that Skype is a proprietary closed system that is less open than your regular phone system.

And even I could tell you that really auction customers just don't want to talk to each other - that's exactly why we are selling online. Talking to random people sucks - random people who call are strange, rude and obnoxious - everyone else just gets on with it and follows the rules. Email is fine for that, anything else is a pain in the butt to deal with and auction people know that.

If Skype wants to get more people using their service they would do like Gizmo have done and create a cellphone application that doesn't try to do processor intensive VoIP on your phone, it just starts two VoIP calls - one from them to the caller, and one to the callee and connects them together on their network. This is a great deal for international calling - something that most cellphone companies make horrendously expensive. If I call the UK from my mobile it costs me at least a buck a minute - almost every VoIP company worth its salt can do that with two VoIP calls for under $0.10 a minute so most of the time, within my plan minutes, that's all I'd have to pay.

The thing is Google already figured this out and has been doing it for their Google local advertisers to connect them with customers - eventually the gPhone will roll, with their own 700Mhz bandwidth and Meraki local WiFi access and Skype will be kissing good bye to their $90 million a quarter profit. Remember the more successful Skype is in gaining customers the less they will make. At over 200 million claimed users they already have 1/30th of the worlds population and probably 1/10th of the eligible customers so it is hardly surprising that a huge volume of their traffic will be internetwork calls that are free. They had better start figuring out how to monetize all those internetwork calls right away or kiss their profits googlebye!