I placed the order online, and on the date that I had requested the service begin, a package arrived containing a broadband router and a few other items. I quickly set up the router, which is Elisa branded and is actually quite a powerful piece of kit. It’s got a cable modem onboard, a DSL modem, 4x gigabit ethernet ports and is packing wireless N. Excellent, thought I. That is until I got the connection up, and ran a speed test, and received dismal results. I was paying for 10Mbps up and 1Mbps down, and I was getting around 2 down and very little up. I ruefully thought of my Finnish friends who had tried to convince me away from cable. But refusing to be beaten, I figured there might be some config settings in the router that I could tweak.

And this is where Elisa has done one of the strangest things I’ve ever come across from an internet provider. All of the settings of this otherwise powerful router are completely locked down, and are only configurable by logging into your account with Elisa/Saunalahti, and going to the “configure my router” page. Here you have a number of settings that are changeable, such as the SSID, the passcode, and a few other core details. Read: very little customisability. They’ve given you this great box, and then forbidden you from touching it.

So I said, screw you Elisa. The only setting that was exposed through the web address of the router was whether it was running as a router, or simply a bridge (connecting the cable to an upstream router). I quickly got out my Netgear router and connected it to the Elisa Kotiboksi in bridge mode, and it worked as expected. At this point, I decided that I had enough routers in the home to risk installing DD-WRT, so I went ahead and did that on the Netgear (3300) and it worked like a charm. I reconnected everything to the Elisa box, and ran another speed test: 11Mpbs down, and 1.1Mbps up. What do you know?!

The skeptics among you will say that cable speeds vary throughout the day based on your neighbourhood’s residents habits. But I ran these tests, from both setups, over a period of 24 hours on a weekday, and saw very little fluctuation.

Our new house has CAT5 cable in the walls, but strangely only one room has the cable outlet beside the CAT5 outlet. This room wouldn’t work for the modem, so I used another and tidily ran the cables under a bed. I was then able to nicely fit my Netgear router into the junction box for the coax and CAT5. The only missing piece was that the stupid Elisa box was still broadcasting a wireless signal. Naturally I could just ignore it… but one doesn’t want to ignore these things. I trolled through every setting I could find, and there was no option to just turn it off. So as anyone in my situation would surely do, I pried the case open and took a look around. Conveniently attached to the main circuit board was an add-in card. I figured it couldn’t hurt to pop it out, and a few seconds later I had the box booted up again minus the add-in card. Low and behold, everything worked as before, but there was no network being broadcast! The Elisa Kotiboksi is now sitting quietly under a bed, not bothering anyone. Least of all me.

Like many SMBs, we spend a lot of our time fighting fires and running from one project to the next. Taking time out to plan for the future is a luxury not often afforded, or not often pursued. I’ll admit also that in the past our organization has had a bad track record for not sticking to plans in the long term. So I was a little reticent about spending weeks of time last year on a 5 Year Plan… but I did it anyway.

Read the full article here: http://blogs.catchthefire.com/office/2010/08/20/the-benefits-of-planning/

…if the company wants to achieve any relevance in this market, it needs to stop acting like a software company, and start acting like a consumer electronics company. It learned that lesson with Zune. It knew it was the only option with Xbox. It needs to do the same for phones.

I love that people are studying this stuff.

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There was a time when your choice of book told people who you were, or at least who you wanted to be. Or, barring that, who you wanted people to think you wanted to be. Having an e-reader doesn’t say anything but “I read books and have power outlets in my home.” (Both admirable qualities, to be sure.)

Luckily for venture capitalists, I have ideas. It’s time for the world of e-readers to diversify so people can make a statement with their choice of electronic word-delivery device.

Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/06/alt-text-e-readers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))#ixzz0sR1723u6

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Read it here.

Flipping awesome.

The back story, is that our good friend Dave was approached to have his master’s thesis published as a book. A thesis and a book are two different things, and significant editing of the original would be required to make it more approachable, and slightly shorter. Having just moved to a recently earthquake ravaged country, he asked Maija and I if we would consider taking on the editing of his thesis. We were very honoured to be asked, and graciously accepted. We’re now a couple of days away from completion, so I’m taking a moment of repose.

Here are the 3 ways that God has blessed us through this:

1. We had recently been impressed by some friends who lent their personal expertise to some other friends for a project. Maija and I agreed that we wanted to be the same kind of people, and asked God for an opportunity. He provided!
2. I’ve been itching to write, and this provides me with an excellent opportunity. In the division of work, Maija tackles the high level concepts and ensures that we’re tossing out and keeping the right things. She’s the Masters student who studied discourse analysis, so this is exactly her speciality. That then leaves the rewording and paraphrasing to me, which is exactly what I want. God is good.
3. This is a paid gig, so it provides a nice little bonus for our work. We would honestly have done it without pay, due to the above 2 factors, but I’m not going to deny that this is a blessing also.

Once this project is done I really want to start a new writing project myself. I feel there is some momentum behind me… and I really don’t want that to die. Editing existing material is really a great way to get going though… a blank slate can be a terrifying thing. If anyone else has some interesting in collaboration writing, let’s do something!

Also… I’m reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s great!

To get your application running on the iPhone or iPad computing platforms, you must go through Apple’s App Store… which is the most genius invention Apple have come up with, to date. How does Apple ensure quality of their products? They control the variables. Until recently those variables have been predominantly hardware elements, but not any longer. Apple now has the ability to control what software you run on your devices, and you have to through Apple to get it, so they know what you’re using. If Apple decides they don’t want a third party product that competes with one of their own titles to even be available on their platform… it’s gone. Which means you only have the illusion of choice, when choosing what software to run on your device.

Some years ago, Microsoft got itself into trouble for bundling Internet Explorer with it’s operating system, thereby making it the de-facto method of browsing the web. Apple, naturally, does exactly the same thing, 0nly they usually don’t get the flack for it that Microsoft does. This has always puzzled me… but I suppose with Apple owning such a relatively small market share of desktop computers, regulators haven’t really noticed that Apple will have 90 million mobile devices in use by years end, and up to 200  million iTunes dependent  devices by end of 2011.  That’s enough market share to do whatever the hell they want… because so many people are so completely sunk into the Apple ecosystem. They could launch a broadcasting network, for example. Naturally as the owners of the network, they wouldn’t broadcast anything they didn’t like. Though of course, once you’ve subscribed to your plans and programs… the rules might change a little.

Apple, once the revolutionary, once the kid sticking it to the man… is very swiftly becoming Big Brother. Their market value is now more than that of Microsoft. Do you really want anyone, be it Apple, Google, or your government, controlling your speech, your artistic freedom, or what you do with the tools you purchase? This is not me being a conspiracy theorist… I hate conspiracy theories… but when Apple says that Flash is dead for their platform… then anyone working in a creative industry should be concerned.

Most people don’t care, because the computers, phones, media players and so on that they rely on today are just so gorgeous, and work so well. But I care. I don’t own an iPhone, not because I don’t want one, but because I don’t need to be online at all hours of the day and night. My wife and my kid don’t need me to be on my work email at 3am, and they don’t need me to be updating Twitter when I’m on the toilet. I don’t own an iPad because I don’t need one… and buying something you don’t need seems irresponsible to me.

But for the rest of the consumer public… who are oh so happy with the latest anything… Apple will own the future. If that’s fine with you… great, but I’d rather not be the one paying the piper.

Now, strangely, the first few times I tried to access the IIS 6 manager, it wouldn’t open. I received an error stating the wait operation had timed out. I checked everything I could, there was nothing useful in the event log… so eventually I removed IIS completely and then slowely re-added it piece by piece. Now everything works fine… though this morning I found the entire SMTP configuration had reset to default, so there may be something still a little wonky here.

I ran across another odd quirk, which seems to be default behaviour in IIS since 5.1, but I’m surprised that I’ve never encountered it before. The problem arose when we found Windows Authentication just wasn’t working when we set a hostname. Without a hostname it would work, but with a hostname we just kept getting prompted for authentication over and over again. The event log revealed a login failure with the status code 0xC000006D. A quick Google search turned up this document which explains it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

So we disabled the DNS check, and now the sites all work fine. Strange things… but this is why you test.

blue.com – news aggregator
red.com – Digital cinema company and community
yellow.com – yellowpages
black.com – Africa focussed news aggregator
white.com – domain squatter

off.com – Off! bug repellent
on.com – chat site like chatroullete

hot.com – Obama site?
cold.com – domain squatter

good.com – Technology firm
bad.com – domain squatter

yes.com – internet user radio and chat, like chatroullete meets last.fm
no.com – norwegian search engine using Google

up.com – Union Pacific railroad company
down.com – dictionary definitions for the word “down”

left.com – Left Field Productions video game company
right.com – Manpower and management services company
wrong.com – domain squatter

in.com – Yahoo style news and views
out.com – Out Magazine for gay culture

smart.com – Smart brand cars
dumb.com – popular games, jokes, sites and news

empty.com – coming soon…
full.com – domain squatter

cute.com – domain squatter
ugly.com – Comedy Central site for Ugly Americans
pretty.com – domain squatter
beautiful.com – Redirects to pg.com (Proctor and Gamble)

thin.com – domain squatter
thick.com – domain squatter

safe.com – Software company who make CAD/spatial design software
dangerous.com – Coming soon, site for extreme lifestyles including extreme sports, MMA, tattoos and piercings, clothing, etc.
safety.com – “the official safety site of the internet”, general safety tips
danger.com – Subsidiary of Microsoft, makes mobile communications devices

funny.com – “your destination for anything funny”, videos, pictures, jokes site
sad.com – domain squatter