line of site

my first official spinoff

with "friends" ending and spinning off "joey" and all, i got to thinking, "i need a spinoff!"

plus, i am starting to get enough traffic around here just on bluetooth connectivity in cars that i've decided to launch a second weblog just on coverage of this topic, titled the admittedly bland "the bluetooth car weblog."

you can find it here: http://bluetoothcar.typepad.com/main/ if you are interested in such things. i've copied over the archived content and comments. i'll still cross post the original content, but plan to do more pointers to external coverage and such over there. if it's related to wireless, carriers, or devices, you will still be able to find it here.

we'll see how maintaining multiple publications is!

hey sprint pcs, clean out your photo albums!

although i've resisted, i had to go get a sprint pcs account/camera/video phone for a project we're working on. i got one of these toshiba VM 4050 which is a really great handset, but we'll leave that for another time.

anyway, on first use of the camera or camcorder to upload media to your online album, you have to setup a password. when i tried, it kept prompting me for a password. i couldn't set one up and soon figured out a password was already assigned, probably the last 4 digits of my ss# or something.

so i go online to pictures.sprintpcs.com, enter my new sprint pcs number, and go through the "forgot my password" pages, so that my password gets messaged to my phone. 2 seconds later, i get "Dear Member, Your Picture Mail Password is: POOP". hmm, i think, that's an odd default password.

so i log in via my browser and lo and behold, an album with someone else's pictures! including porn! Sprint, you might want to go talk to lightsurf who manages your online album about this one!

(click for larger image, porn blurred to protect the innocent)

wireless cabin - 'bout time

reading this perspective of guy kewney i wanted to say, "duh!" but since that term is so eighth-grade, i refrained. i routinely have to travel with 5-6 cell phones, and i very rarely if ever turn any of them off, and if i do, it's to save the battery.

using cell phones on planes would sure create some annoying situations, but i'm all for it - more for data access than voice. retreiving mobile email and texting sure would be helpful in a whole lotta cases.

oh, and here's a secret - if you can still find one of those mobitex RIM blackberries - they work over much of the U.S. and Eastern Canada, especially when you fly over metropolitain areas. in old BellSouth country which now belongs to Cingular, you can get blackberry email between Atlanta and Orlando no problem almost the entire flight. two bars in the window seat the entire way.

is RSS following in the path of WAP?

no. it's not. at least not in my opinion. i keep seeing random posts about how the many different RSS standards and Atom ( like this one, nothing against this guy, everyone is entitled to their own opinion) will lead is leading it down the exact path to death that WAP followed.

the logic seems to be:

RSS has a lot of competing versions. WAP had a bunch of different competing versions. WAP died. Q.E.D. RSS will die.

that's not my opinion and here's why:

1) people seem to confuse WAP with it's original markup language, WML. WML did have X x Y x Z permutations where X is the manufacturer, Y is the version, and Z is the gateway. it was difficult, but people solved this problem, by creating frameworks to deal with it and using UAProfs. there were quite a few products that dealt (and still deal today) with this problem in an elegant manner. creating content was not the problem, and had nothing to do with the death of WAP, again in my opinion.

2) WAP died because of network latency/slow phone processors, which was the exact problem it was trying to solve. WAP was supposed to tokenize it's markup language, WML, and send a binary representation to the phones, thus reducing the work on the processor and reducing bandwidth by a factor of N, making it fast and usable. good theory, bad implementations. WAP was launched on phones using CSD which i think was still too slow to make these applications usable. people gave up, and WAP got a bad reputation. by the time GPRS came along, it was too late.

3) WAP died because of poor application design on small screens and keypad input. Too many people tried to just transcode existing 800x600 applications to fit onto a 60 x 30 screen. posting data was a nightmare, and people couldn't easily enter information using a keypad. the few applications at the time that were designed for this i think were usable, and perhaps somehwat useful, but they were the minority. again. bad rep.

4) WAP died because the mechanisms for push were ignored or weren't made available by the carriers. WAP push, which allowed an application developer to start a WAP session based on alerts or stimulus from a PC based system. only Nextel and Sprint PCS in the early days made this available to developers, but it was never implemented by commercial applications. SMS launching WAP browsers was first implemented on the Ericsson T68, again, after it was too late.

5) WAP died because superior solutions were coming to market. the experience of an XHTML browser, and the silver bullet that would be brought to market by iMode made developers, and more importantly, the enterprises that were getting no return on the investment they put into WAP/WML, to kill all the budget surrounding these applications. because the version 1 projects using WAP/WML were so dismal, combined with the bubble bursting, enterprises and finiancial institutions say "no way, quit it".

6) the divergence of WML was largely a time to market issue tied to hardware deployment cycles (development of phones had to precede deployment by 6-9 months) , the divergence of RSS/Atom is a personality conflict. the former was largely solved by a standards organization (WAP Forum/OMA) getting involved, the latter has yet to get there. there were valid reasons for the divergence of WML, beyond differences in syntax.

so, if you beleive my hypotheses above for why WAP died, if RSS dies, it won't be because of divergence, it will be for other reasons, like people just getting plain fed up with the immaturity surrounding the open syndication community, and glomming onto an open standard that a standards body creates, and syndication clients start to support.

after all, it's all about a publisher being able to reach the biggest number of readers. once microsoft says "Longhorn will support open syndication format X" guess which version publishers are going to start piping out?

where will the new playground be? (google IPO commentary)

there always seems to be one playground corporate environment in silicon valley. in recent memory, there was SGI, then netscape, both jim clark joints, who ironically complained about going public and being "drawn and quartered" in whatever that ghost written book he put out was called.

being drawn and quartered means the beginning of the end of the playground work environment, with all workers constantly watching the stock price, and EVERY business decision is based upon three month increments (i.e. the quarter) of what you have to report to the market. there are some things that really suck about working for a public company, and being drawn and quartered is the biggest one.

of course, the cash infusion is great, and allows the playground environment to exist for quite some time while the employees watch the IPO price swirl down in the direction the Coriolis Effect dictates in their particular hemisphere. i had fun witnessing this process with the most successful canadian IPO, but canadian playgrounds can't compare to those in the valley.

a recent trip to google makes it clear that google is currently the reigning king of the playground work environment, also ironically, in one of the former houses that jim clark built (they are in SGI's old offices). plenty o' fluffy couches, stocked fridges full of all the premium drinks you can get your hands on, and search ticker projectors showing the latest (porn filtered) searches in every reception area. lunchtime soccer games in the ampitheatre park, all the free food you can get your hands on in the cafeteria - who wouldn't want to work here? especially with the promise of a (at the time) looming IPO announcement and all this fun, c'mon. the day i was there alone, NBC was shooting a spot in the "quad", and sergey was leading al gore around with an entourage that sat down right next to us in the cafeteria.

now google will have some interesting challenges ahead. with the public market making sure they expand their empire every quarter, things will have to tighten up, right? don't get me wrong, this boatload of cash will fuel plenty of parties and fun sales meetings, and i don't expect those fridges to be downgraded to pepsi products any time soon. with some young founders now rich beyond their wildest dreams, how engaged will they be? expect google to make some public moves with their cash to keep the stock price afloat, and a bunch of new service offerings to squash competitors on many fronts.

so anyway, good luck to google, have fun while it lasts! who's next?

tradeyourphone.com

an interesting service tradeyourphone.com. they match you with someone else you want to trade phones with, you each pay them $10 to grease the skids.

i like this business because they are just market makers, like eBay, and assuming they can generate some volume, this could be a decent business, and it's a niche enough thing where people wouldn't necessarily to do someone like ebay to do this.

i haven't tried this, and i know nothing about this company, but it is an interesting business. of course, someone else could do it for $5 ($10) per transaction and still make money i think, which seems about the right price point.

spam 1, me 0

i've decided to give in on fighting spam with bayesian filters and move to a challenge/response system, namely, mailblocks.com. it's dirt cheap at $25 per YEAR, and if it works as advertised it seems to be the right solutions for my mobile lifestyle. that, and the continuing suckiness of my DSL provider, Speakeasy, makes me think that hosting mail somewhere else might not be such a bad idea.

i receive most of my email on the go, and although have an unlimited data plan, the alerts received from spam have gotten too annoying. plus, i can pull in the already filtered email i receive on hotmail and yahoo and consoldiate it into one account that i can pull down to my mobile devices.

on my desktop, i use apple mail, which used to catch 100% of the spam, and now catches about 25% as spammers have gotten the best of bayesian filtering. same with procmail solutions. there's probably better things i could and am able to install, but it's just not worth it as hosted email is getting so dirt cheap.

so on to the next battle, until spammers figure out C&R. is this the right solution to spam? probably not. personally, if sending spam was punishable by their choice of death or roo-roo, they might think twice about sending it.

just a plug...

...for one of my colleagues, dick costolo, who gets some good press in this article RSS: Not Just for Bloggers Anymore.

one of the great things about our FeedBurner project/company is that it's right in that fun sweet spot of getting a lot of press.

i've been concentrating a bit on the convergence of RSS in mobile, and it's getting interesting as well. over a year ago, we saw RSS starting to become the preferred model for operators to accept RSS content feeds into their Content Provider interfaces (in Europe, mostly). now, i've seen a few projects in north america that have taken this model as well.

i'm sure we'll see more

treo 600 email woes

i was just about to pen a glowing review of the handspring treo 600... which has performed flawlessly as a business tool for me over the past couple of weeks...when all of a sudden, something happened. the built in email app started locking up the device every time it checked mail.

it didn't seem to co-incide with installing or un-installing any app...it just started happening, and now it happens every time i check mail. using a third party mail app works fine, but i really like the OEM mail app's ability to browse HTML email, and alert me when i have new mail on a regular basis.

i've tried deleting and re-adding my mail account. no dice.

anyone else have this problem, and even better, a solution?

signed,

thank god there is a reset button on the palm

feed stats

just for the sake of getting this out there...now that i've been tracking my feed stats with FeedBurner for a few weeks...i can see which feeds are being consumed by whom pretty easily.

i've offered at least 3 versions of feeds for awhile now, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom... and my usage is as follows:

RSS 1.0 30%
RSS 2.0 64%
Atom 4 %
Others 2 %

politically, i don't really care which of these formats ends up winning...it will be up to the clients (RSS Readers) to decide which versions to support, and the format that makes it easiest for RSS Readers to move beyond the 3-pane display and deal with things like the i-tunes namespace (like apple has), photo feed namespaces (like textamerica has), etc.

as i'm leading up the charge here in developing mobile readers for J2ME, BREW, etc for some of our solutions it's something i'll need to look at closely from a product management standpoint as to what will sell software and service. that probably means multi-standard support for now - but i hope it shakes out in the near future.

from an objective standpoint - from initial conversations i've had, the blogging engines want to support Atom (in addition to RSS )because of its 2-way support for posting to weblogs, but corporate publishers seem like they will just stick with RSS 2.0 because of stats like mine...it's what they're readers are using so if they ever hope to monetize their feeds they're just going to stick with what is working.

interesting.

more new feeds; new service!

i haven't had a chance to redirect my old feed URLs yet -but if you get a chance, please adjust the URL in your feed reader to be one of the new feeds in the lower right that have been lit on fire thanks to FeedBurner.com.

FeedBurner is a side venture my Burning Door partners and I have started that allows you the publisher to control the content of your syndicated feeds, get detailed statistics on who is reading your feeds, save on bandwidth costs by having us cache and manage your feeds, and lots of other interesting services to be coming down the pike.

you give us your feed URL, and we hand you back a new URL to put on your site. you can apply services to the feed in the middle and get statistics on what's happening. you can create as many variations as you'd like for your readers.

so if you're reading this and you publish RSS or Atom for people to read, give it a try. heck, if you're not a publisher give it a try.

one of the services we're offering is a "Mobile Filter" which will be tuned to save mobile bandwidth and work well with wireless RSS clients including the BD3 Feed Reader.

as an added incentive for publishers to try this out. I'll be picking an assortment of feeds syndicated through FeedBurner using the MobileFilter to be the "default" feeds in the upcoming releases of the BD3 Feed Reader.

feel free to shoot me an email with a URL where i can see the feed on your site in case i miss it.

more on the moon...

the other day i wrote about servers on the moon. well if you go to this link...check out the google ads. what?! you can really buy property on the moon? and again, how does one claim that land? that's governed under whose law? because the US was there first, do we have squatters' rights on the whole sattelite?

seems a little like buying the brooklyn bridge.

i hope the chinese land on the moon soon. they got a lot more people to move up there and claim property.

servers on the moon

i can see the VC pitch now... "servers on the moon. that's it. servers on the moon." sure why not. want your data archived in a safe place free from natural disasters and terrorism? what could be safer than the moon?

well, apparently, that's what la jolla based transorbital has in their business plan, and they are licensed by the US Government to do commerce on the moon. ( for now, let's let it slip how presumptious of the us government to think the US owns the moon.)

also apparently, high bandwidth laser communication exists that will allow transorbital to put servers on the moon over successive flights and communicate with these servers wirelessly (duh) from earth. pretty cool.

for now, you can pay them to put a time capsule on the moon, as well as text messages of your thoughts and dreams so that they "live forever". ah, selling eternity. all a little too vanilla sky for me.

bone conduction phones

while browsing about, i've seen quite a few people lambasting bone conduction phone technology - and i'm not sure they get it. i actually think this is an important technology that will find some popular uses, especially with the hearing impaired.

in a nutshell, normal hearing works as soundwaves pass through the airwaves and are picked up by your eardrum which vibrates, and through some amazing analog to digital conversion, your brain is able to interpret these signals.

bone conduction works by passing these waves though the bones in your skull directly to the inner ear, and is able to bypass the normal process of amplifying the soundwaves for you to hear, thus taking away the interference of all other soundwaves coming in, and making it possible for those who can't hear as well the normal way to hear.

this works both ways. in fact Jabra headsets for some time have used a similar technology to transmit when you speak by detecting the bone vibrations from your jaw instead of the soundwaves coming out of your mouth.

at any rate, i can easily see this technology being used to create a bluetooth headset that is nothing more than an earplug, as well as a special class of cell phone to be marketed toward those with hearing problems, especially the elderly.

some links:

http://www.akibalive.com/archives/000506.html

http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2004/01/21/1074360813226.html

couple new feeds

just a quick note that i added 2 new feeds from the index page - an atom feed, and a feed for comments. if you want to follow a discussion, add the comments feed to your reader. thanks to eric for his work on the comments microfeed.

atom: //www.burningdoor.com/steve/atom.xml

comments: //www.burningdoor.com/steve/comments.xml

palmOne to use symbian? that'd be cool

i gotta be honest. i don't like the Palm OS at all. i say this having owned every generation of palm, handspring, pda, treo, whatever since my very first palm 5000, which i think was actually called the "US Robotics Pilot".

(this statement reminds me of the guy on vh1 on one of their "top 100 worst movies of all time" specials who said "Showgirls was the worst movie i ever saw. i hated it the first time i saw it, i hated it the second time i saw it, and i sure as hell hated it the third and fourth times i saw it" - aw...but i digress again)

why? it's clumsy, buggy, seemingly single-tasking, and allthough it's getting better version to version, adding a phone to the OS always seems like a bolt-on. no!, i didn't say strap-on. get your mind out of the gutter. there's a reason there's an exposed reset button on the back of the palm, and a stylus that unscrews to reset it.

but there's a lot of great apps that i like on the palm, and most palm users i know can't live without their palm apps, and the desktop sync that's so much more robust than anything else out there.

there sure is a demand for palm phones. ATT wireless is sold out of Treo 600s, and all the backordered units i am told will ONLY go to new account activations. i've only met one Treo 600 owner who didn't absolutely love the device.

with that in mind - i've often wondered why no symbian licensee has created a device with a palm's form factor to compete against palm here in the states, and why symbian hasn't attacked palm head on. ever.

so i think this article in "el reg" is pretty interesting, and i think is a sign of better things to come from palmOne, if they can figure out how not to maroon their huge user base in north america. oh wait, maybe *that's* what palmSource is for!

blogspam is becoming a problem

although ingenious, blogspam is becoming a problem on this site, and i am sure others. yes, someone has written scripts that post spam as comments to moveable type sites. i end up having to delete at least one per day. i guess there are plenty of ways to combat this such as changing the name of the php script used to post comments or continued filtering. i guess this element has to creep into every real or virtual part of our society. what a drag.

great article on planespotting

this is a little off topic, but i wanted to point out matt's great article on planespotting. i'm not a landing-gear-head, but as a frequent business traveller who has spend many an hour on the tarmac at airports with exciting scenery like o'hare and toronto, i find myself wondering often "what type of plane is that?" to pass the time. hopefully soon he will cover the interior configurations and answer the question "which planes offer the best chance for an upgrade?"

mobile development on the mac

ever since we started spyonit.com (sorry, no link to this one) which was run primarily on solaris x86, i have been on a quest to find the perfect unix laptop on which to develop and otherwise enjoy all there is to enjoy in the computing world. at that time, solaris x86 itself had no drivers available for pcmcia, and the linux distrobutions were pretty crappy as well, especially for laptop support. there were a few hacks around that would help get these running on an ibm thinkpad, but nothing stable enough to allow me wear the different hats i had to wear as a development manager, product manager, and executive manager.

finally, a little over a year ago my engineers turned me on to what apple was doing with OS X, and what they had brought onto the powerbook g4 lineup, which at the time only came in the 15" non-yao-ming-non-mini-me version. it seemed to be perfect for everything i needed to do - command line unix support, a supported java IDE in borland jbuilder 7, and supported microsoft office suite in office.x. so i had quickly forsaken the shitty canadian toshiba laptops our IT department provided for people and plopped down my own cash to purchase a powerbook g4, which i used with great success in those management, marketing, and development manager roles that i had to perform.

here at chez burning door, i've had to delve into some more development tasks, specifically in the mobile arena, and unfortunately, i've had to bring my old thinkpad out of mothballs. now i'm a 2 laptop man.

i certainly don't want to go back to XP as my sole machine. there's no way i could live without my powerbook these days for most of the work i have to do, not to mention organizing my life. it's not quite bumper sticker worthy of you can take my mac when you pry it from my cold dead hands but damn close.

to put it bluntly, there's no good way to develop for

* J2ME
* BREW
* Symbian C++
* Microsoft Mobile

on a mac. there is a gcc port of the brew environment sans emulators, but it doesn't compare to the visual c++ version. microsoft mobile i understand, that's fine.

and no, virtual pc is not the answer. don't get me wrong, virtual pc is an amazing piece of software but i've tried running visual studio and codewarrior inside of it, and it all works fine, but too slow to be productive.

on the j2me side, i've even stooped to installing red hat in a virtual pc, and running the supported linux development tools and using X to present it to the powerbook, but that's too slow as well.

on the pc (and linux virtual pc), i've been using sun's studio one 5, preview to do development, which is okay, but being a a Java app, how hard is it really for sun to support this on OS X? actually, it does run on OSX, but the wireless toolkit (WTK) does not. it uses native code for preverification and the emulator uses a native DLL as well.

i've found a few excuses as to why sun doesn't support os x, and to summarize it's because it doesn't help them sell hardware. fair enough, but don't they also make money selling SUN studio one? also fair, if apple wants to keep me on their platform and upgrade, they should support development tools running on their platform. jbuilder 9 for linux does run on os x, but it's not supported by borland - they abondoned support after jbuilder 7.

part of the marketing of os x is that it's part open source, part commercial. well, that's where mobile developers are stuck on this platform: between half-ass open source solutions, and commercial solutions that can't make a business case for supporting os x.

well, the point of this whole rant is for any of those mobile developers out there wanting to switch to the mac, caveat emptor. it's highly encouraged, but don't ebay that pc just yet.

which wireless carrier should i choose?

are you asking that question? in a new world of wireless number portability (WNP) it's now easier for some people to move from carrier to carrier because they can keep their phone number. it hasn't really happened yet, but i would expect there starting to be some promototions to get you to switch, the same way you get competing offers from long distance carriers.

a caveat - the first decision factor will always be the coverage map the carrier provides versus where you use your phone. ALL carriers have dead spots in their coverage map, and ALL carriers are inconsistent as to their customer service and uptime of data services. some are better than others at other things that will drive your decision.

anyway, which carrier should you choose in the US? here's my rundown of the "big 6". i have or have had acess to plans with all these carriers fairly recently, so some of this comes from personal experience, other parts come from hearing others' experiences.

T-Mobile
you should choose t-mobile if:
1. you live in a major U.S. city and you travel to europe or asia. yes, att and cingular also offer GSM phones that roam on some of the frequencies used throughout the world, but in my experience setting up roaming is easier with t-mobile and also have better roaming agreements in the major european countries.
2. you want to use mobile data extensively to retreive email and browse data on your phone. t-mobile's $19.99 all you can eat GPRS data plan is not touched by any other carrier
3. you want to spend a lot of time in starbucks with wi-fi and you want it all billed to the same place as your mobile phone
4. you want to equip quite a few people in your family with mobile phones and use mobile-to-mobile. t-mobile lets you pool minutes, and also have some good m2m minute plans
5. you want to change phones a lot or often. because t-mobile shares their band with europe and asia, the latest phones that work there work here.

you should NOT choose t-mobile if:
1. you live in a somewhat rural area or travel frequently in a car off US interstates 30 miles outside of a major US city
2. you want a really easy time downloading all sorts of games and other add-on services for your phone. this can be done, but t-mobile is very slow to the gate on this one
3. you want a really consistent coverage map. t-mobile has more dead spots than the average carrier - resulting in more dropped calls, especially while in a car or on a train.

AT&T Wireless
you should choose at&t if:
1. you live in a major US city, you might want to travel outside the US with some frequency, AND you want to download a lot of games, videos, and integrated services all billed to your cellphone. AT&T's mMode portal has really gotten a lot better in revision 2 on the latest phones - and their downloadable services are great without having to sync with your PC
2. you want to change phones semi often.

you should NOT choose at&t if:
1. you live in a somewhat rural area or travel frequently in a car off US interstates 30 miles outside of a major US city
2. you really use a LOT of mobile data, such as if you have a sony ericsson p800 and want to constantly update all your email over GPRS

Sprint PCS
you should choose Sprint if:
1. you are tied to the Palm OS as also being your phone OS. sprint seems to get the best Palm phones first, and their PCS Vision network seems much faster than the GPRS versions of these Palm based phones.
2. you do a lot of browsing using a browser using one of these phones

you should NOT choose Sprint if:
1. you want to travel with your phone outside of the US and Canada
2. you want to have a phone compatible with "standards" used throughout the world such as MMS, SMS, bluetooth. Sprint has their own versions of such things but won't be able to integrate easily if the day ever comes when all carriers want to interoperate seamlessly

Nextel
you should choose nextel if:
1. you want to use DirectConnect, the push to talk walkie talkie feature. it's built into their network, and no other carrier will do this right for some time, imo
2. everyone else you communicate with also already has a nextel phone
3. you have a boat that doesn't go that far from shore. i don't know if it is their frequency but i have found the few time's i've been on a body of water nowhere near a cell tower (like lake michigan, or off the cost of florida in the boating lanes) that nextel phones worked when others did not

you should NOT choose nextel if:
1. you want really cheap voice and data plans
2. you care about such things as "migration to 3G", upgrading your phone to the latest and greatest tech every year. nextel wants to stay profitable, so they aren't going to make such investments until the tech is totally proven out
3. you don't like motorola phones. that's pretty much your only choice here

Cingular
you should choose cingular if:
1. you want a cheap family plan with multiple phones per family with pooled minutes
2. you like the idea of "rollover minutes" where if you don't use minutes one month they rollover to the next
3. you want a wide choice of "multi-network" phones, that is, those that work on the GSM network AND on the more rural TDMA network. that is if you occaisionally travel abroad but also travel to rural destinations and big cities in the US, cingular has more phones that support this
4. you really really want to use AOL IM as your method of sending text messages to other friends on AOL. you can do this with T-Mobile too, but it might be cheaper with cingular.

you should NOT choose cingular if:
1. you want a wide choice of PDA/phone combinations. they offer a decent blackberry plan
2. you want a phone that supports email. they are getting some phones that are doing this but with their current data plans i estimate it will be really expensive
3. you want the latest and greatest technology and services

Verizon Wireless
you should choose verizon if:
1. you want voice coverage wherever you go in the US. i acutally think their coverage map is the best.
2. you want to use their high speed 1x PC card service with your laptop
3. you really want simplicity in downloading mobile applications to your phone. NOTE: simplicity is key. it is not cheap. their get it now service is the best at this BUT it is REALLY REALLY expensive. most of the apps now have a MONTHLY subscription fee and it really adds up.

you should NOT choose verizon if:
1. you want a clear picture of what your monthly bill will be. verizon nickels and dimes you for everything such as detailed billing, browsing, text messaging, and mobile data usage beyon what every other carrier does
2. you want an accurate up to date picture of your billing usage. i have seen firsthand verizon come back with billing usage from over 3 months ago. their excuse was "it takes awhile to download billing records from the tower".

should you choose a regional carrier?

if you stay close to home and care about really local features and services, then a carrier such as U.S. Cellular might be perfect for you. typically, the competition has forced these carriers to offer some really competitive plans in the major markets and not having a national footprint is letting them innovate faster as well.

do as i said, the above are just some of the reasons you may or may not choose a new carrier - part of it will be if you want a specific device tht is only offered by that carrier. this is really only an issue with nextel, verizon, and sprint - with the GSM carriers, you can get plenty of phones on the grey market from places such as romeo hifi or gsm phone source that are SIM unlocked and will work across the GSM providers (careful though, att and cingular have an 850 mhz band that won't work with some of these phones depending on where you are).

going to vegas for CTIA?

if so, i highly recommend bringing down the house by Ben Mezrich. It's a great retelling of how a team of MIT students invented a collaborative card counting scheme to incredibly raise their odds at blackjack and legally take the casinos for millions - until one day...

this is a fast adrenaline driven read that i could not put down once i started - in fact i finished it all in one day. there are some great stories of what goes on for the high rollers in the strip casinos, most of which i have also heard from some relatives who work in the industry. this will definitely make you think twice about playing blackjack at casino odds, and make you feel even worse if you're a weekend card counter. this was the big time!

does sun finally get it with project rave?

only time will tell, but the marketing sounds good to me. sun announced project rave yesterday, which seems to be their foray into providing an integrated development environment for the java language and j2ee platform.

i've managed development teams who used both j2ee and .NET, and the one thing that has always stood out about microsoft's approach is the integration of the toolset and the language. they owned and developed both, so there was never a lag between language features and the tools that supported them. on the j2ee side of things, there was always a choice of which environment to use, to the point where it was hard to find two developers using the same toolset. this is neither good nor bad, as long as developers were productive, and we didn't have to waste time or money discussing such things.

of course, there also aren't many (any?) third party IDEs for .NET, so it remains to be seen whether this will hurt vendors like Borland, whose JBuilder offering has been one of the best games in town for large development teams who do choose to standardize on an IDE.

if anyone gets early access to project rave, or have your own opinions, feel free to comment here!

Short and Sweet Movie Reviews

just a plug for "the last" don chartier's self describing "short and sweet movie reviews". the don sees a lot of movies, and personally i don't want to know more than he writes about a movie before seeing it. more often than not, i find myself clicking on the netflix link to throw it in my queue.

btw, does anyone know that walmart also rents dvds by mail? didn't think so. it's cheaper than netflix, but netflix just works too well for me to switch.

cable modem vs dsl - my story

there's been a long going media war about which is better: cable modems or DSL? i have followed the arguments over time, but until recently i was not fortunate enough to have a choice. Three years ago AT&T@Home brought cable modems to my neighborhood, but i was "too far from the central office" to get DSL. So i subscribed to cable modem and endured the transfer from @Home to AT&T and then endured the transfer to Comcast, while everyone else raved about their DSL lines.

DSL supporters warned that cable modems shared bandwidth with others in the neighborhood, and my speed would soon eek to a crawl, but this never happened. AT&T et al seemed to expand the network as needed to keep the bandwidth at way over acceptable levels, so i was a pretty happy customer. i did experience occaisonal outtages, for an hour at the most.

The problem came when i needed to have a static IP address at home. A static IP address in the home is useful for a lot of things...not only hosting a website, a home email server, or family photo album, but also for setting up VPN access to corporations who have IT departments that only allow incoming traffic from known, static IPs.

I had gotten by in the past by keeping a DHCP lease open on the cable modem so that my IP address never got reset. the few power outtages we had reset this, so i had to update DNS on a few occaisions. when comcast took over from AT&T, however, is where things went awry. comcast started to force expiration of the DHCP least every 3 days, probably to keep people like me from doing what i was doing!

A few calls around comcast revealed no knowledge of such a static IP product, nor plans to do so. In fact, their agreements prohibit users from running servers of any kind.

at the same time, yahoo/SBC started marketing DSL in my area, so i said what the heck, i'll try it.

now, anyone who dealt with SBC's predecessor in this area, Ameritech, should remember what may have possibly been the worst customer service ever, with installation technicians that may or may not have shown up let alone complete an installation correctly. SBC brought some southern hospitality to the customer service, but this is clearly the same Ameritech underneath.

as a preface, before we moved into my house, the city changed the street name. it exists on the platte of survey under one name, and with the post office under another name. although SBC had in one database that i was eligible for DSL with my correct address, they still had the old address in the DSL database, and could not relate them. ( where's all those "connect legacy systems together" companies when you need them? hey webmethods, go talk to SBC! can't you just "throw in" one of those "enterprise busses" and fix this? ) long story short, the customer service rep said "well you are definitely able to get DSL, but i can't put an order in for you, so sorry. i can put it down in my notebook to call you if this ever gets corrected". yeah right.

so i moved on to another choice, speakeasy.net who i had heard good things about and said they were able to sell me DSL. they resold Covad in my area, and although they were twice the price of Yahoo/SBC, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush - so i placed an order for a 1.5 MB down/384 up conenction with a static IP address. three days later, i get a call from speakeasy that the technician will be there for an install.

now who shows up, of course, but an SBC technician, because SBC owns the copper from the box to my house. so i relayed the story to him about trying to buy DSL from SBC expecting an explanation but he wasn't surprised one bit. he ( an ex ameritech technician, of course ) said something to the effect of "those f!#kheads in the front office will never get it right". at any rate, he hooked up my DSL, i installed my filters and DSL modem and i was open for bizness!

suddenly i felt the pain. what had i done. my snappy connection was now to be described as "sluggish" compared to the cable modem. a few tests using the tools at dsl reports reported that my connection was getting near what was advertised, but yet it still was not as snappy as my cable modem. I called speakeasy, and they were receptive to the problem, but i am not sure what ever happened.

but the story is not over yet. suddenly, a week or two after the install, my DSL modem started to lock up on a daily basis, with no pattern. all the lights were on, yet no packets were getting out. resetting the modem would always cure the problem, but this wasn't an acceptable solution when i was travelling and needed to get at my email server.

another call to speakeasy. "outtages are hard to diagnose. we can oly diagnose while it's down". so i wait until the next day, and call again. "yes, it's hung. reset the modem. okay, good. well, we have no idea, we'll have to call covad to come out to the house."

three days later a covad technician ( another ex-ameritechee) does stop by, listens to my problem, and goes to the telecom box outside. "ah here's your problem, pointing to a broken wire in my phone box". turns out the brittle half of a twisted pair was broken, but somtimes making contact. his explanation was the cable modem would fill up with errors, and when the modem fills up, it shuts down. resetting the modem clears the buffer. well there you go.

so here i am with what's now reliable DSL. it's still sluggish compared to my cable modem but i'll live. i'm investigating setting up a router that would use the cable modem for all outgoing connections and the DSL for all inbound connections but i'm just not sure it's worth it. i know there are DNS/DHCP solutions, but i manage multiple domains, and this just seems to complicated for what i need.

why comcast can't get their act together and offer static IPs is beyond me. i'm sure they are worried about one person hosting a server and slowing down the neighborhood, but i just never experienced this as a problem.

other articles in:

salon

cnet

sprint pcs vision phone catches alleged abductor

well, anyone that saw csi miami last week should be encouraged by this.

Teen turns phonecam on stranger trying to lure him into car

i know many people buy mobile phones just for security. stuff like this will provide additional reason to upgrade. peace of mind.