Olivier Travers

State of my VOIP Setup

I just bought a prepaid data package from Claro, one of the three mobile telcos here in Chile. After fumbling with their settings (their APN for prepago banda ancha is bap.clarochile.cl, not bam.clarochile.cl) I've just completed a successful call with my Teliax account on my Nokia E71 to my Vonage account. The chain involved goes something like this:

Nokia SIP call -> Claro 3.5G network -> internet cloud to the US -> Vonage -> more internet cloud back to Chile -> Tutopia DSL -> Cisco ATA 186 -> Philips VOIP841 wireless phone (for whom Vonage is my "landline", I also have Skype running on it).

There's probably 20,000 miles worth of roundtrip involved, with data packets going through air, copper and fiber. Try to visualize it.

]]> My wife who was upstairs picked up the phone, and my unscientific measure of the lag involved was maybe 0.5s. I admit my whole internet/VOIP setup is a bit complex: cable/dsl/3G, IP clients include laptops, a smartphone, a NAS (downloading 24/7 in the background), three VOIP providers, an Xbox360 (well it's toast right now), two internet mp3 players... But the bottom line is, it's un-freaking-believable what we can do with IP devices these days.

When I was working at AT&T in 1995, the company had very visionary products, from what would become wifi, to WAN video conferencing to early tablet PCs. None of it worked too well, and the party line was that VOIP wouldn't work through IP over Ethernet: "We tried it, no can't do. Dude, you want voice/video over even just your LAN? Go ATM." Well, 14 years later, there's maybe 10 miles of ATM involved (it's used by DSL providers) but the whole thing is IP traffic.

Update: Wow, a well-written Wikipedia entry? There's hope after all.

I haven't been able to get my new 3G modem to work when plugged into my Draytek 2910G router yet, though their supposed to be compatible. Gotta get it to work as a backup in the rare case dsl and cable might be down at the same time. (Me, paranoid and obsessive compulsive? You bet.) I'd also like to get Teliax to work through my other router (Draytek 2600VG), no dice either. More nerdrage needed to get everything fully working I guess. (SIP settings and registration management on Nokia phones are a bit screwed up, so there's been some bitching involved to get where I'm at right now.)

Update: I've updated my Grand Central account to Google Voice. I can route my Google Voice to either/or Vonage and Teliax (also meaning, the devices of my choice, at my desk or on the road), get voicemail to text or recorded calls for free. Amazing.

Nokia E71 Apps

Quick notes on apps I'm using with my E71 smartphone:

Nimbuzz and Fring because (unless I'm being really dense here), Skype Mobile doesn't support free skype-to-skype calls over WiFi. I'm using Teliax as an SIP provider. (This would give me a cheap option on the move, as well as a Vonage/Skype backup at home since one of my routers does SIP too.)

Gmail with sync'ed contacts and calendar using Mail for Exchange and Seven (which might actually be enough to handle push). Nokia Messaging but doesn't recognize Gmail labels as directories, while the Gmail app
doesn't do push. I'm not able to push the new tasks in Gmail yet, but email/contacts/calendar is quite nice already.

Opera Mini and Skyfire browsers. I love to multi-task between browsers, this is my mobile version of tabbed browsing.

Sports Tracker.

Nokia Maps (I rolled back to 2.0 from the 3.0 which didn't work for me - how to download maps) and Google Maps. You can use Nokia Map Loader to give you great offline support on your phone.

Extra dictionaries.

Newsgator Go which I'm not in love with, but I like Newsgator Online and obviously I want subscriptions and read/unread status kept in sync. It's got caching which should be useful to have stuff to do while offline.

Devicescape Easy Wifi so that various applications don't have my home WLAN hard-coded in their settings.

Nokia Location Tagger to geotag pictures on the fly.

Though not technically an application, I like dabr for Twitter mobile access.

Youtube Mobile Application is nice though limited, but I've never been a Youtube power user anyway.

Jbak TaskMan

I'm planning a trip to the US in April/May (Denver and Miami) and want my phone to support me as much as possible during the trip. I usually rely on a good old piece of paper with all the necessary addresses and phone numbers and what not, but I hope it will act mostly as backup from now on.

Update: I've set up Teliax and made a couple test calls, seems pretty good so far. Vonage has seemed on the brink of extinction since pretty much they got started and Skype has never worked quite as well for me (some calls are great, some are crappy, it's always been more uneven in my experience). Plus, Vonage's soft phone is not cheap and I'm not sure there's even one for smartphones. More options means more resilience means less headaches and downtime.

Also: E71 tricks.

Update about push email: Seven sends SMS to the UK in a kind of sneaky way behind your back, and it doesn't work seamlessly with Devicescape Easy Wifi (at least for me). Not sure it's going to be my long term solution, especially given it won't work with messages stored on external memory. I tried Emoze but it doesn't seem to manage folders, at least not the free product. Next: Profimail.

Offline Gmail

Gmail + Gears if finally happening. The pieces are really starting to be put together by Google here. Good move.

Want Timely Firmware Updates? Don't Buy a Nokia E71

To help other people from being sold a device that's not going to be maintained by its manufacturer, let me warn you that some versions of Nokia's E71 smartphone sold in the US (aka E71-2 NAM) have not received any firmware update since the product was introduced on the market last year. Meaning, known bugs have been fixed for some customers, but I and others are left hanging dry. That's rich for a $400 unlocked phone sold by one of the biggest ecommerce players in the consumer electronics world (Newegg.com). It's not like I bought the phone for cheap from the grey market and unlocked it with an unsupported hack.

Nokia is aware of the problem but doesn't even have a deadline to fix it. I thought they finally meant to be a competitive player in the US but it seems I was wrong. Also, apparently Nokia is too poor to py for decent upgrade servers.

Looks like Palm is back in the game so if Nokia doesn't get their act together I'll be on the market again soon for an unlocked phone that can work worldwide and is actually properly supported by its vendor.

02/15/09 update: proceeded with the finally available update. Going through applications to see things are working fine, Gmail settings didn't make it even after backup/restore (since the E71 doesn't save user settings through firmware updates - yeah it's stupid at that price range).

Google App Engine Gets Serious About Availability, Transparency

After Zoho, Google. Now we're talking: System Status Dashboard, Quota Details Page, and a Billing Sneak Preview. These quotas and billings make me think Google must have hired someone who used to work in the mainframe business at IBM. There's a pretty decent roadmap and feature release log too.

Someone knows what they're doing in this Google department. If they manage to stay aligned with Salesforce.com, the Google Apps/Force.com combo could really threaten Microsoft and Oracle a few years from now.

Google Apps + App Engine + Gears + Chrome + Native Client + network investments, they're not toying around. There's a deliberate web application strategy at work here with more chances to succeed than Netscape ever had in the 90's. This is a much, much better direction for Google than weak wiki-based offerings or pondering whether to buy Digg.com. I'm starting to be excited again by a refocused Google that seems to gain from the pressure brought by the recession. It helps that Yahoo and Microsoft have been more inept at search marketing than I thought was possible, but Google is starting to show fresh vision and good execution outside of Adwords.

Zoho Gets on Public Health Status Train

Kudos to Zoho for introducing a detailed dashboard monitoring the health of their online applications. I'm very pleased to see more and more web app vendors delivering on transparency I advocated as early as 2001 for online apps and services.

At Watershed we have our own mini health portal with tabs for our internal and external apps. Most of our vendors now at least have some sort of blog keeping track of scheduled downtime and unforeseen issues. We're lobbying those who still don't so they get on board. And this is part of my default checklist each time I'm considering potential online software vendors.

Off-topic notice to the non-existent readers mourning the long-gone days when I used to blog more often. You can get more frequent Olivier fixes on Twitter. One liners work well for me as I rarely find the time to research and write longer blog posts anymore. Speaking of micro-blogging, we're also satisfied Yammer users, which is really filling a gap for distributed teams.

Plowing through Unstructured Data

Jon Udell just experienced some of the practical limitations getting in the way of sharing and representing structured data easily that I've been running into myself. To produce an entry about Circuit City's store closures, I had to spend a lot of time massaging the source data (coming from a PDF) in Excel so that it was properly mappable and chartable. Tasks that add little value and should take 5 minutes easily balloon into hours of menial work to renormalize and restructure data that should have been published as csv or xml in the first place. "Fake" digital content is going to get in the way of publishers for the foreseeable future. The challenge is to optimize workflow to get a decent production cost/time for enhanced news coverage. It's all about making things replicable.

Dept. of People Who Know What They're Doing: DabbleDB

I've looked at online databases and spreadsheets rather extensively a couple of months ago, and DabbleDB had hands down the most powerful yet usable user interface of the bunch, significantly ahead of what Zoho or Google (among others) have to offer. Too bad DabbleDB is right now heavily focused on private use. Its dynamic features cannot be embedded in a high-volume public site though it's on their roadmap to support such scenarios. All you can share publicly are static snapshots which don't reflect the added value of what their UI does in the backend. Their pivot table-like functionality and mapping integration not only show the way of what modern intranets should embed - this is also what professional online news publishing should be about.

Now, look at their snapshot archive. It's a calendar-based interface (no doubt inspired by Windows Restore) that lets you roll back to older versions of your online database. This is, again, a level of control that most web app vendors don't even think of, let alone execute properly. Go go DabbleDB, you stand above the crowd!

US 3G PAYG BYOD OMG WTF?

I'm thinking of buying an unlocked Nokia E71 (about $400 at Newegg, the Blackberry Bold isn't really available unlocked yet at decent prices, and the iPhone has half a dozen dealbreakers for me). I want a device for use in various countries in South America, North America and Europe to have easy voice, email and web access while traveling without constantly needing my laptop. From what reviews report, the E71 can run Skype among other VOIP options, has a real keyboard, isn't a brick, is a decent email client, mp3 player and GPS, and an OK web browser and camera. I want to avoid at all costs the total rip-off that are overpriced contracts and international roaming, and I just want to own by own damn device without bending backwards to keep it unlocked.

So right now I'm trying to figure out what's available in the US, and let me tell you, Sprint, T-Online, Verizon and Sprint are competing to win the Most Useless Website award. So I'm begging you, dear reader, to email me with info on how to get 3/3.5G access in the US (most importantly, New England) without a damn yearly contract (ideally, without any sort of contract at all, as sometimes I just spend three days in, say, New York and don't go back to the US for six months so even a month-to-month PAYG contract is overkill).

Any help appreciated (email, twitter or IM, comments here are broken). Progress, if any, in my quest, will be updated here.

Update: bitching on my blog unlocked the right google query which led me to this, which looks like a winner. Update: or not as it looks like a loophole, but hey AT&T don't bother even listing PAYG data plans in your GoPhone pages, right? Medianet Unlimited is "unlimited" only if you use a phone without a full-fledged keyboard. Jokers/crooks. But then you have iPhone 3G users doing it. Seems worth a try buying one of the $10 GoPhone.

Update about the E71, it works in Europe and the US because it's quad band GSM, but 3G is an either/or proposition:

- Europe: E71-1 RM-346 = GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 900/2100 HSDPA
- US: E71-2 RM-357 = GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 850/1900 HSDPA

Well at least Chile is running HSDPA 1900 too, and I don't go back to Europe much these days. Can't have it all I guess, but what a headache.

The Entertainment's Political Bias

For your entertainment: the Hollywood overwhelming leftist bias in numbers. To be taken with a grain of salt given PoliticalBase's elusiveness about how it collects the data and where it's coming from. It makes it hard to know how thorough or accurate this representation is. But it matches my expectations (did you say right-wing bias?) so it must be right!

Latin Drum Grooves

The full drumset is not really a central instrument in Latin music (as opposed to a bunch of percussion instruments), nonetheless many Latin grooves are playable on a drumkit, especially if you add a couple cowbells and woodblocks. Since I play on electronic drums, I can just add whatever sample I want on any of my pads, cymbals or pedals. I'm just getting started with Latin rhythms so here are some useful pointers:

Songo is an exception as it's actually been written with the drumset in mind (by Los Van Van).
Son Clave
Rumba Clave
Patterns in chart form (if you can't read music)
Clave, they key to afro-centric music
Semantic hair splitting about clave - does enjoying this makes me weird?
Tumbao beat, which on the drumset applies mostly to the bass drum.
Reference books: Afro-Cuban Coordination for Drumset, Afro-Cuban Grooves for Bass and Drums
Akira Jimbo made a Latin Independence video years ago, I think it's available only as a VHS or ripped. Not beginner stuff for sure, but if I can manage to play at least his first patterns, I should really gain in 4-way independence. Playing hi hat and clave with the same foot (toe and heel respectively) is daunting though.

]]> Rumba and Son Clave are almost the same yet sound different. You can invert the two bars in these patterns, which gives you 3-2 and 2-3 Son and Rumba claves. Now the tough part is to feel which one is being played by a Latin band (not easy for an untrained ear listening to a busy mix) as the whole thing needs to be smoothly integrated throughout the music. You can't change clave within a song just at random. This article has listening guides to help follow a few specific songs.

On a tangent, this brings me to the subject of Spanish. We've been in Chile for almost a year and my Spanish is still quite minimal. Not that I'm really trying, so what gets in comes out. However, in my defense, Chileno is to Mexican or Cuban Spanish what Portuguese from Portugal is to Brazilian. Much, much harder to just catch by ear. Oh, and there's Chilean proprietary slang. At least, when we went to Oy como Ayer on Calle Ocho in Miami a few months ago, I got to pay for our cover charge in Spanish. Nice club by the way (yet another tangent, it's a good thing I don't blog much anymore), great mojitos and tapas and real contemporary Cuban music (timba has a funky pop vibe and sounds like, for instance, Charanga Habanera more than Buena Vista Social Club -- inheriting from bands such as Los Van Van and LG la Banda), but pretty expensive too.

Still Quite An Analog World We're Living In

Sometimes it feels like we're swimming in an endless sea of digital content, and to the extent I for instance have more than a terabyte of media on my own local network (currently 16 IP devices!), we are. But once you dive in, you realize that a lot of it is digital only on the surface, but analog underneath. From mp3 files that are just a compressed sound wave rather than the original digital tracks to scanned PDF files that you can't search or index. Consider that Wal-mart PDF annual reports from as early as the mid nineties are images, not text. Similarly, many government documents released after FOIA requests are just scans. What you see happening is digital sources dumbed down into digitized analog content. A lot of structure, meta data and meaning are lost in the process, and "print to PDF" as opposed to "save as PDF" makes a world of difference. I'm impressed by a number of ongoing efforts, from the Show Us a Better Way initiative in the UK to what sites such as Freebase are trying to accomplish, but we're still a long way away from the universal data cube!

As a publisher we're starting to work on adding our very modest contribution towards that elusive vision. An enormous amount of time goes wasted within companies to just gather and aggregate market or industry data. You haven't even started analyzing the data that you're already exhausted by all the scrape-copy-paste-clean-massage-normalize work involved. This makes it hard to reach conclusive insights because the waters often remain muddled in apples mixed with oranges, and it's not any better when companies are dealing with their own internal data.

We're not going to go after this pain by trying to boil the semantic ocean (good luck with that to the start-ups in that field). Rather, we intend to put together tight data packages in our selected verticals. Trade publishing is stuck in the 80's for the most part, which helps explain the turmoil currently seen in companies such as Reed Elsevier, Penton or Cygnus. The print and events legacy is really hard to shake off for these guys. There's a lot of value locked there that's just not delivered to business audiences in convenient ways. Data products tend to be published behind the firewall through expensive and complicated offerings. I'm not saying we have the answer, but I do think we "have the question" better than most.

Hopefully we'll start fleshing out these ideas into actual products within the next 12 months. It's been baking for a while, from our Focus Article format at Defense Industry Daily to pretty much what MarketingCharts.com is all about. Now we intend to turn our sites into application/news hybrids (let's face it, publishing charts in gif format is just a stopgap), and that's going to be a tough but fun ride. Now let me go back to shutting up and working on execution!

How Southwest Hedges Its Fuel Costs

Interesting interview with Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly.

10/16/08 update: Southwest Airlines posts 1st loss in 17 years.

Why I Unsubscribed from The Economist

I used to really like this magazine. A couple years ago they changed their Editor in Chief. Seems the new guy's goal is to turn it into another wishy washy leftist vehicle. Look, there's Newsweek, Michael Moore movies and countless others for the reality-challenged masses. Suddenly The Economist was publishing articles blaming Estonia for daring to move a statue erected to praise their Russian invaders. Now there's routinely similar nonsense such as this on corporal punishment citing the indisputable authority of the UN or some semi-literate social "scientist" no doubt confusing correlation with causation. Seems the government is superior to parental judgment on educational matters. Yeah, Sweden for everyone! Confusing a regular spanking with abuse is about as dumb as it gets. I'll spank whenever I feel it's the only option left to get some sense into my kids. (As an aside and just to get it off my chest, on such issues my view on the opinions of childless people is, shut the fuck up, have kids of your own and show us what a great parent you are.)

I now fully expect a glowing endorsement for Barack Obama. Hay for change and hope! Free rainbows and unicorns for all! Another publication goes the PC crap drain. Oh well. We're in a "stagflation/stop the war" mood these days so I guess it's not fashionable to be a right-winger, just like in the 70's. Big thumbs down to George Bush for screwing up the conservative cause so badly.

All That's Wrong with Microsoft

Here's a really excellent wrap-up of the staggering mediocrity at Microsoft for pretty much a decade. Detailed, informed, right on target.