• Being able to clearly hear other participants
• Being able to be clearly heard
• Others hearing a minimum of the ambient noise around me
• Being able to easily mute my line
• Being flexible to be used around the house

Up to now, I’ve tended to just use the speakerphone on one of our Siemens DECT handsets, which has fallen down on a number of the above requirements. VOIP has tended to be unreliable for a variety of reasons, not all of which are in my control. A fixed phone is out of the equation due to the location of the only phone socket in the house and a desire not to have cables snaking all over the place.

Our DECT phones do have Bluetooth, but they have been really unreliable when it comes to using with a headset. So, I’ve been looking for other options for a while.

The one I am now trying is a Plantronics C70 wireless DECT headset:

This is basically a regular DECT phone, but without the form factor of a phone, having just a mic and speaker. It connects to a DECT base station like any other handset. As usual with Plantronics gear, the quality is good and it is quite attractive to look at as well as being comfortable to wear. The docking station is used for charging. A full charge takes around 3 hours and claims to give up to five hours talk time.

Whilst incoming calls can be answered by pressing a button on the side of the headset, the astute will wonder how it can make outgoing calls without a keypad? The answer is that you need to do this on another phone, then transfer the call to the headset unit. Most DECT systems support call transfer. This is relatively painless in real life and I find that I’ve dialed in, entered my passcode and transferred the call to the headset before I’m joined into my conference call. The main pain here is that you need to keep another handset nearby.

Once on a call quality is good and I’ve not had any complaints about my voice quality, hiss, echo or background noise. I used to get this all the time when using the handset speakerphone.

Volume controls are located on the earpiece and are easy enough to use. However, my main gripe is that there is no dedicated mute button. Muting/Un-muting yourself involves holding the volume down key for a couple of seconds. Firstly, holding down a button behind your ear can become uncomfortable. Secondly, it means there is an appreciable delay before I can mute/un-mute myself which leads to stuttering when trying to respond to a question or avoiding others hearing dog barks! Thirdly, there is no way to have visual indication of whether you are muted or un-muted, therefore they use a quick double-beep every 15 seconds to remind you when you are on mute. In practice this is not intrusive mainly because the volume of the beeps is low compared to the noise of the conference call. However, the main failing is that the same beep mechanism is used to confirm the mute/un-mute operation. Three mid-tone beeps for mute and three low-tone beeps for un-mute. Because these are so similar, and both very hard to hear over conversation, you end up being unsure about exactly what state you are in, or if the button press has worked. This leads to “can you hear me” moments. Plantronics should either: provide a dedicated mute button on the earpiece; increase the volume of the beeps; make one a different number of beeps; or have a visual indicator on the dock when you are muted (though I realise that requires some wireless communication to happen between the dock and earpiece)

My other gripe is that it is sometimes hit and miss when replacing the earpiece in the dock. Twice now I’ve gone to start the first call of the day by picking the earpiece out of the dock to find out it is completely drained as the it hadn’t connected completely to the charge connectors.

Overall though it has been good to use and has certainly greatly improved the experience of taking regular work calls from home. A few tweaks and it would be perfect.

The order dispatch email gives a tracking number but no details about what to use to track it. It seems that they are based in Germany and the stuff so far is dispatched from there, so the DHL Germany site is the place to enter your tracking number. Just enter it in the Sendungsverfolgung box.

Alternatively, if you use the Delivery Status widget on OS X you can track DHL Germany shipments using that.

I am an Englishman living and working in Dublin, Ireland. As such, I receive BBC channels via my Sky subscription, including BBC One and Two. As you broadcast your channels free-to-air I can also happily receive BBC Three, Four, News, Parliament and all BBC radio stations via Astra on my Sky box. However because your use of Geo IP location means that you consider me to be, quite correctly, outside of the UK when visiting the BBC home page I notice that the TV Channels widget shows me:

* BBC World News
* BBC America
* BBC Prime
* BBC Canada
* BBC Kids (Canada)
* BBC Food
* BBC Arabic
* BBC Entertainment
* Animal Planet
* People+Arts
* UKTV Australia
* BBC Knowledge
* BBC Lifestyle

Which is about as useful to me as a chocolate fireguard. If I go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/ then I see the same, with a small box at the bottom showing links to the regular BBC UK channels.

In the two years that I’ve been living all of 100km from the UK mainland (a gap, by the way, that your AM broadcasts manage to bridge allowing me to continue to listen to 5 Live in my car on the way to and from work!) I’ve become used to the complete and utterly indiscriminate nature of Geo IP location technology as used by the BBC to control access to content for the UK licence payer. I’ve become used to its use in sweeping editorial changes to the BBC News site meaning that I can no longer choose what news is most important for me (because, as currently displayed, the beheading of a teacher in the Philippines is NOT more important to me than the story about the DUP’s dismissal of PSNI reserve abolishment plans shown in the same position on the UK front page!) I also accept the fact that the provision of expensive services such as iPlayer should only be available to licence holders. What does boil my bag is the black and white decision making that this technology imposes. You are either UK or not, and if not then hey, the entire world is lumped together in one group who obviously share the same interests and access to services. One supposes that the very same technology that can tell you when somebody is accessing from within the UK can also tell you (at least as reliably) where they are accessing from when outside the UK. A little customization would go a long way.

You know, I shouldn’t really complain too loudly. You see, I appear to head through some magic portal on the way to work every day, for when I get to my industrial estate on the outskirts of Dublin I am seemingly transported magically back to the UK. I see the UK news; see the uk channels; hell I can even use iPlayer if I wanted to waste my employer’s bandwidth. Never has the sheer lunacy of an access control mechanism based SOLELY on the use of Geo IP location been so comprehensively proved to be stupid. Yes, as you may have guessed, the network connection of my Irish employer pops out onto the internet somewhere in the UK. When, when will you wake up and realise that for the sake of a few development pounds you could provide much more utility to your consumers. For that matter, when will you realise that people outside the UK pay good money to shonky VPN suppliers just to get access to iPlayer and therefore circumvent Geo IP location. I know that you may not be so used to such things with your public sector ancestry, but that is a POTENTIAL REVENUE STREAM for you to exploit. Start offering a subscription model. If Spotify can do it properly I’m sure the combined talents of the BBC can. I’d pay to be able to receive BBC services in the way I want.

Finally, whilst I am on a roll, maybe you could answer a conundrum that I’ve so far failed to resolve. It is a simple question: why do you not care that Sky can make money out of providing your two main channels to customers in Ireland completely legitimately by placing them on their EPG and advertising them without those customers paying as single penny to the BBC in licence fee? We are not dodgy costa-del-ex-pats using a viewing card registered to a UK address, we are legitimate customers availing of your most expensive programming completely for free. Or are we? How do you get your coin from such people? Do you get a percentage from the ROI licence fee? Do Sky pay you? Or is this simply a gaping hole in the policies you otherwise use Geo IP location to so strictly and unashamedly implement?

The good news is it is perfectly possible and the steps are basically the same. The additional good news is that it also appears to work fine with newer Sametime versions than those specified. I have got it up and running with the embedded Sametime in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 for example

To get it working follow the Infocenter instructions but at step 1.a where it talks about modifying plugin_customization.ini you’ll need to know where to find that on Sametime or Notes on OSX:

For Sametime:

1. In Applications find Sametime.app
2. Right click and choose Show Package Contents
3. In the Finder window that pops up go to Contents/MacOS/rcp and you’ll find plugin_customization.ini in there

For Notes embedded Sametime:

1. In Applications find Notes.app
2. Right click and choose Show Package Contents
3. In the Finder window that pops up go to Contents/MacOS/rcp and you’ll find plugin_customization.ini in there

Then just edit the file and set the:

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.brokerbridge/startBroker=true

property. You will likely find the property already specified, but with the false value so just change to true.
If you are using the Notes embedded Sametime then step 1.c is also slightly different. You will find the menu you need under File | Application | Install…
Then just follow the rest of the Infocenter instructions and everything should work!

Anybody following me on Twitter or Facebook will know that over the last few months we’ve had some pretty significant changes in the Spender household. Here’s the full story.

We both grew up in and around families with dogs and have often talked about the time when we will be able to get some of our own. With us both working full time and living in a flat we never thought it practical or frankly fair. Then one day Lana came home from work…

It’s a long story for another time, but in short, we found ourselves with a dog which had been effectively surrendered into Lana’s care. The dog in question was a less then year old Jack Russell Terrier cross (with what we don’t know but we suspect some Corgi in there which would make her a Cojack!) We did the usual things you do with a stray/lost dog including a trip to the vets to check for a chip, posters, informing the Gardai and so on. After a week or so of convincing ourselves we could not possibly keep her we arranged for an animal rescue in Co. Wicklow to take her. On the day we took her down but couldn’t come to let her go. So it was that Lucy became part of the family!

This meant a number of adjustments to our lifestyle. Firstly we moved to a house with a garden. Luckily our lease was up shortly anyway and due to the market our new 3 bed house was significantly less rent than the flat! In addition, Lana quit her job and has subsequently found a better, part time position in nursing which offers us much more flexibility around being making sure that one or both of us are around for most of the time. It also meant I finally had the excuse to give up my 11 year old Mondeo for a nice nearly new Avensis estate.

The summer with Lucy was fantastic. She really became an integral part of the family and has charmed everybody who has met her. She has had her fair share of visits to the vet for allergies and the odd infection. Perhaps that may be why somebody decided they couldn’t cope with her because you would have to be mad to give up such a dog otherwise.

The plan once we were in a position to get dogs was to always get two so recently we began the search for a companion. The plan was to get a similar size and breed, but a male (of course we’ve had Lucy spayed) The plan was also to get a rescue dog. After much looking around, we found Jack:

Once again, he has settled in brilliantly and is getting along great with us all. Naturally there has been some jostling for position between him and Lucy (she is winning) and the occasional argument over food or toys but overall everything has been really good. it is great to see them literally bounce off each other and provide endless hours of amusement for both them and us!

Previously I’ve kept work-related posts to a minimum and tried to focus on more personal stuff. That’s going to change in an attempt to revitalize my blogging. As an IBM software developer there are often things that I need to be careful about mentioning in public and that will certainly remain the case. However there are a lot of IBMers publicly talking about their work and where it takes them and I don’t see why I can’t too.

So from now on you can expect to see much more about Lotus Connections and my work interests in general. One thought I’ve had is to do some periodic posts on aspects of WebSphere Application Server that Connections administrators may find useful. I’ve been a user of WAS for ten years and have both consulted on it as well as develop parts of it in the past so hopefully I can provide some hints and tips of value to those not so familiar with the application server.

However it won’t all be about Connections and WebSphere. I’ve a great interest in agile development and in particular Rational Team Concert so there will likely be the odd post about that, as well as other software engineering and social computing topics that take my fancy.

Of course, it won’t all be work and no play – there will still be occasional posts about a new toy, hobby, pursuit or other activity. I’ll make sure to use categories well so you can skip past the stuff you don’t want to read.

If you still have me in your feed reader then thanks for sticking around and let me know what you think.

Thursday sees us set off down to County Kerry to start the Focus Ireland Four Peaks Challenge. The actual walking starts off on Friday morning when we tackle Carauntoohill, the largest mountain in Ireland. That is followed by a 5-6 hour drive up to County Mayo. The following day we climb Mweelrea before another six hour journey up to Newcastle, Co. Down in Northern Ireland. Sunday morning sees an absurdly early start to climb Slieve Donard, before heading back down to County Wicklow to do Lugnaquilla on Sunday afternoon.

My training and preparation has been somewhat patchy thanks largely to the demands of work. I’ve deliberately not done any of the mountains we will be climbing, as part of the challenge for me is to do them for the first time. We did go out in January and got half way up Lug before I decided to turn around due to the horizontal blizzard and general white-out we faced! Other notable outings include a huge 23km trawl over four Wicklow mountain peaks which saw me get huge blisters after about an hour in and then struggle around the rest.

To be perfectly honest, I am not 100% confident of completing the whole challenge, but it will take a lot for me to give up at any point. Unless I am really, really slowing the team down I will carry on regardless. At the end of the day, in isolation, none of the walks are that physically challenging it is just putting them together and having all of the travelling in-between.

Talking of the travelling, that has been one of the major logistical nightmares of the challenge. The rules state we need two non-walking drivers for each car taken. That raised the issue of finding people who wanted to come along but not actually walk, as well as sorting out how many cars and who goes with who. In the end we are taking our car, and Lana is driving, along with a friend of one of the other climbers. The rest of the team are then in another car.

Unfortunately, the travel headache was further complicated by my car actually breaking down on our way back from a weekend in County Wexford on Monday. It has been fixed (alternator) but we now have to be up early on Thursday to drive down to Arklow to collect it, before coming back up to Dublin to then head off back down to Killarney! I think I’m going to up my recovery service membership just in case!

We’ve hit our sponsorship target, but if you wish to support us, and Focus Ireland, you can do so here.

Let’s go onto Ford Ireland and spec it out. The rule is to choose the most expensive body style, model, paint and extras. We’re going to town here.

That’s a cool €50,125, not including delivery and related charges, apparently.

Now let’s go over to Ford UK and choose exactly the same thing… But hang on a second, it seems like there’s more choice of model and extras. Let’s stick to our plan and choose the best of everything:

£35,565 – a lot of money. But let’s convert that into Euros at the current mid-market rate: €39,666.82 Hmm…

Now let’s look at what your money buys you in the UK:

- A Titanium Sport X versus a Titanium S model
- A 2.5 litre petrol engine versus a 2.2 litre
- Full Alcantara leather versus part-leather
- DVD navigation with touch sensitive controls and USB
- Solar reflective windscreen versus (presumably) a non-solar reflecting one
- Privacy glass
- Sliding load floor
- Dog guard
- Multimedia DVD system
- Roof rails
- 6 CD external autochanger
- Keyless entry and keyless start.

No wonder I’m still happily driving around in my 11 year old Mondy!

I’ve loosely followed the whole thing about the recent change in Facebook terms of service, and the change back again. I read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog in response, and the one announcing the revert to the original terms. Overall I was impressed by the honesty and upfront nature of his response and admission that the legalese that their terms are written in is frankly insufficient for people to actually work out what on earth they meant.

The request above came from a good friend (why else would I have photos I took at their wedding) and I have honoured it. Not out of disgust at the actions of Facebook, but because I value a friendship more than I do the opportunity to make a point (that’s what this blog post is for instead!) I do however think it is a perfect example of the disjoint between people’s expectations of the ownership and privacy of content on the web, and the ways in which we currently try to encapsulate the rights associated with the various parties involved.

Let’s look at a few facts:

1. The photos were taken by me at my friends wedding, at which I was a guest.
2. The wedding was held on private property – in this case a hotel.
3. The law says I own the copyright to the photos
4. Would I ever want to use them commercially, I would need to clear that with the owner of the private property they were taken on, and, if for non-editorial purposes, get releases from anybody in them (mainly my friends)

The trouble is that what the law says, and what people expect are two different things. My friend obviously believes he has a moral assertion over the photos, being as they are a record of what is one of the most important days of his life. I can’t reasonably argue with that, but the law doesn’t see it that way – they are mine to do with as I wish.

But let’s look at the other side of the picture, as that what’s under the microscope with regards to Facebook. Wanting to share my photos with my friend (and our mutual friends) I posted them onto Facebook. People liked them and that’s great. I could have posted them onto flickr, Smugmug, Picasa or even onto my own web site (actually, I did, and there’s a link to an album running right here in another of my blog posts…) By posting them to Facebook I placed a certain level of trust in Facebook to “do the right thing” with regards to the content I was asking them to store, and to distribute amongst my social network. Did I read the full T&Cs when I signed up? Did I heck. Did my friend? I wager not. Had I read them way back then, I would have seen this:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorise and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence (with the right to sublicence) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorise sublicences of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the licence granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Chase Jarvis, a world-renowned commercial photographer who uses Facebook to distribute content for PR and his fans has written a much better analysis of the old and new terms than I could, so I’m not going to go into detail about what that long paragraph contains, or the important change that was made, causing the uproar.

It may seem stupid that Facebook have such wordy, hard to understand terms, and indeed it seems that they go well beyond what would reasonably be needed for them to receive and permit the sharing on user generated content. In the past I have berated other organizations for similar wording, not least the BBC. However in those examples my concern has been about the use of such terminology as a way to sucker unsuspecting citizen journalists to give potentially timely and valuable content up freely, or as a competition only vaguely hiding an obvious rights-grab attempt. Indeed this blog carries a logo and link to the EPUK fair play campaign for citizen journalism for just this sort of thing.

So, the question is do I really think that Facebooks terms represent a realistic threat to my content? Are they *really* going to take what I share on Facebook and use it for profit, resell it to other organizations, or other such actions? In short, are Facebook evil? I don’t think so.

I have personal experience of what happens when the lawyers get involved between two parties wanting to do something logical and simple. I’ve seen this through my own work, spending months working with a third party, with code written and ready to go, waiting for the lawyers on both sides to argue over single clauses and being asked how such clauses affect the technology (normally not at all) What Facebook are guilty of (and admit to) is that they haven’t done a good enough job of turning the legal crap into understandable principals that you and I can make informed decisions on.

Regarding the change in terms (which basically removed the ability to revoke the licence you give them when you delete content – something I have now done with my photos of the wedding) I honestly believe that there is no realistic chance of Facebook ever asserting those rights granted in the way that people are reading into it. As Chase states, it is there to allow them to effectively share content amongst their user base. I’d also wager it is there to cover their arses should the fact that the massively distributed, non-normalized data store that sits behind Facebook doesn’t manage to delete the hundreds, possibly thousands of copies it stores of every photo, video or other piece of content you contribute.

The only unfortunate thing is that there is no filter between what they have to get their lawyers to draw up and what they present to their users. It makes no promises back to the user.

Let’s use an analogy. In the UK there is an organization called the Plain English Campaign. They award a crystal mark award to clearly written documents. It is common to see this mark on things like insurance documents. Over recent years, there has been a distinct attempt to make many forms of legal-related documentation more understandable and consumable by the lay-man, much of it driven by the initial work of this group. Their FAQ includes this:

Who are the worst offenders for gobbledygook?

In our experience, the legal profession and finance industries cause the most concern. Many companies have worked extremely hard to use plain English, but these industries will always be our main targets. Plain English is about language affecting ordinary people’s lives, and people have the right to get the information they need to make informed decisions about money and the law.

One example of improved communications thanks to such efforts can be found in the UK mortgage industry. Any mortgage product must have a Key Facts Illustration document that has two important purposes:

• To enable the consumer to carefully evaluate and consider the product before committing to it.
• To allow the consumer to effectively compare different products in the marketplace

The KFI is a clear, concise document outlining the most important points, in plain English. Now, what if Facebook’s terms were presented in this manner? Would I have read them? Yes. Would I have considered if I was happy with them before accepting? Yes. Would I understand the true intent behind them better? Almost definitely yes.

Now, what if we had a similar initiative for the web, for the world of social computing? Well maybe, just maybe this whole episode may provide the catalyst for that to happen. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with a couple of folks from dataportability.org At the time I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the organization or their goals, it seemed broad and lacking distinct focus, but one thing that did stand out was their desire to build a charter for the social web. It seems that now is the time to grasp the nettle and drive this forward and I really hope that their EULA and TOS task force can be the agent of change for this whole problem. Daniela’s and Elias’ blog posts give me a warm feeling that they just might head in the right direction with this. I hope Facebook jump on board.