Monthly Archives: November 2008

Happy Thanksgiving

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I’m thankful that I have good work to do each day.  I tell my kids that there’s nothing wrong with profit, as long as you’re helping somebody in the world.  Work doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t help somebody, and I’m grateful that I can help people in my daily work as an information technology consultant.

So, I’m blogging this as the bird is roasting in the oven.  Soon, the house will be filled with the delicious aroma of turkey, onions, stuffing, and simmering giblets.  Then, I’ll skin the potatoes, boil them,  and gently mash in the cream. A little garlic will go a long way, too.

See, this is only the second Thanksgiving since the end of my marriage, and the first one where I get to cook everything.  I’m even making sweet potatoes for my guests, which include my mom, girlfriend, and her family. I’ve never done it by myself.  After the holiday, the kids will come back home and we’ll eat turkey sammies for a week and a half.

I hope your Thanksgiving is as fortunate as mine.  To all my readers, blogging buddies, business associates, and friends, I wish you a very happy holiday and a great extended weekend. See you soon.

The iPhone Battery Life Primer

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If you’re like many iPhone users, you suck the power out of your battery completely about once every 24 hours. The more useful a thing is, the more you use it–hence, my iPhone’s battery tends to be more empty than full. Here’s what to do to keep that battery alive:

1. Disable 3G. Bar none, this is the single most effective way to increase battery life on the iPhone. If you can tolerate the slowness of Edge and you don’t use any realtime data apps (like VoIP stuff, say), then Edge should be sufficient. You’ll probably have fewer dropped calls with Edge too.

2. Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth. Unless you’re using them, WiFi and Bluetooth are battery killers. Besides, the gimpy-ness of the iPhone’s Bluetooth support makes me question why anybody would leave it on at all.

3. Decrease the frequency of e-mail checks. This will result in fewer data transmissions and preserve the battery.

4. Install the 2.2 firmware update. Apparently, it helps.

Web 2.0 wake-up

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(Note: I realized after writing this whole post that I began referring to Web 2.0 in the past tense.  Hmm.)

Phone Boy has a snappy post up today.  He’s appreciating Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 while simultaneously blasting the same-old-same-old intellectual currents of the blogosphere.  While I’ve never read 451, I do agree with Phone Boy that the amount of original thought coming out of the blogosphere has diminished considerably.  It seems that this has occurred mostly since more people started blogging regularly.  Professional blogs, amateur blogs, good blogs and shitty ones.  From Engadget all the way down to the proverbial full-time mom earning income at home for three bucks a post, the blogosphere, and the Web 2.0 world at large, is filled with increasingly irrelevant voices.

And why are they irrelevant?  Because they’re all saying the same stuff.

At its start, Web 2.0 was uniquely set apart from Web 1.0 because it neither sold the user anything (ie. Amazon 1.0) nor tried to replace an offline product (ie. NYTimes.com 1.0).  No, Web 2.0 was mostly about using the collective of individual user opinion to democratize good ideas, and perhaps even to monetize those good ideas.  Often, those good ideas were just blog posts with fresh philosophy or some tidbit of revelation about technology or science.  Sadly, Web 2.0 moved away from that whole idea, and it’s devolved into a sort of commentary on the technology industry where every author claims to be an industry insider.  I liken it to a guy who plays great poker quitting in order to write about other poker players because it’s easier to write about them than to play against them, ie. easier to write than to THINK.

If the blog aggregators have told us one thing, it’s that we, as self-proclaimed industry insiders, mostly think alike.   Is there a fear of public scrutiny that keeps us from blasting each other on our blogs?  Or is it simply bad form to have a public debate any more?  I don’t seem to have a problem with taking people to task publicly. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a problem being taken to task myself.  In fact, I do it so much that I’ve been called a grump, picky, hypersensitve, overly critical, you name it.

Don’t care.

I appreciate those who adequately express their own isolated opinions, rather than piling on the prevailing dogma of the blogosphere at any given moment, blowing the wind of whatever current Online Weather System is buzzing through.  Honest, concrete expression of unique ideas is what’s missing from these buzz machines.  A prevailing concept blows through the blogosphere and gets just beaten absolutely to death by the Agreement Monster.

Critical thinking goes out the window and you get a chorus of two hundred 22-year-old part-time bloggers saying Cloud Computing is to file servers what file servers were to mainframes, each unaware, at first, that his contemporaries are all reporting the same “news” as gospel. By the time you’re done reading Techmeme’s top post on any given day, you’ve probably consumed 15 posts that agree whole-heartedly, 5 posts that have a keyword match on a tag but are either unrelated or one paragraph in length, and 1 or 2 posts of dissenting opinion.

In questioning the easy-to-hold points of view, I often sacrifice traffic.   And that’s OK, because at least I’m telling the truth.  I don’t usually post about something unless I’m passionate about it, compelled to write about it, because frankly, there are better ways to spend my time–helping clients, helping my kids with their homework, etc.–than writing my umpteenth Thesis of Ultimate Agreement with Blogger X or Blogger Y.   OK, if I agree with you, you’re less likely to hear from me on my blog.

That’s OK, there are thousands of others who agree with you.  And you’ll hear from them.   Because they want the traffic from blogs.com and Techmeme.  But how many times do you really need to read the same opinion?

Second Life as Business Tool? WHY?

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I was reading Eric Krangel’s post about what Second Life can do to improve its reputation as Linden moves from irrational exuberance mode to damage-control/survival mode.  Interestingly, Eric seems to acknowledge that there’s *some* business value in using Second Life.   He correctly points out that Second Life is more appropriate for hobbyists and gamers than for use as a business tool, but the fact that he even considers Second Life of any value at all to businesses is laughable.  Second Life–seriously here–is a big waste of time.  Coincidentally, so is World of Warcraft.

“Switching to VoIP” to have its Seventh Printing on Monday

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I’m happy to report that O’Reilly Media will be conducting the seventh printing of my book, “Switching to VoIP“, on Monday.  In this latest printing, 5 issues have been resolved for technical accuracy and clarity.  The first enterprise guide to migrating to Voice over IP, my book has been called, “the voice of reason in an industry full of hype”.

Duffbert of Duffbert’s Musings said of the book, “You have no reason in terms of cost for not diving right in.”

An Amazon reviewer wrote, “I would recommend it for anyone looking to deploy VoIP.”

ZDNet UK wrote, “This is a valuable book for anyone considering moving their telephone system to VoIP.” So order your copy today!

NASA creates new protocol for deep space IP transmissions

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DTN is the outer space version of TCP.  Transmission control with the ability to store an forward large amounts of data in the event of a solar storm or other disruption.  It takes 4 to twenty minutes using DTN to transmit data from Mars to Earth, which, at the speed of light, accounts for ‘space lag’.  The protocol was co-designed by Internet luminary Vint Cerf and NASA. Now when do I get my flying car? Pretty cool, check it out.

PC Magazine to shred print edition, but not all will do the same

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One of things I look forward to most each day is reading the paper. I don’t know if it’s the tactile nature of the paper edition or some romantic appreciation that I hold towards the old media.  I mean, newspapers have been around since movable type was invented–hundreds and hundreds of years ago.  So there’s a certain appeal in tradition.

With tradition comes a sense of comfort and rightness. But PC Magazine feels neither comfortable nor right about persisting with a print edition. Like the hood ornament, print zines may soon be just a luxury item.

Does this mean Time will go online-only?  Almost certainly not.  But the trade journals and vertical publications with a small circulation may be forced into an online-only format due to a number of reasons:

1 – There are just TOO MANY magazines out there.  In any given vertical, there are 3 or 4 magazines. Penton Media here in Cleveland publishes 40 or 50 vertical rags alone, many of which overlap each other in content.

2 – Demographic information about news consumption is easier for the publisher to obtain in an online format.

3 – Social media and the democratic web create “online weather systems” around news items, prevailing concepts, and fads.  It’s nearly impossible to catch a breeze from one of these online weather systems using print journalism.

4 – PCMag has already crossed over the “web revenue hump” that so many publishers struggle with even now.  With 70% of their brand’s revenue coming from the web, it’s pretty hard to argue in favor of keeping a costly print edition around to satisfy the old-timers.

5 – Blogging matters.  It used to be that print journalists, and in particular, newspaper folks, would dismiss bloggers as inaccurate, teeth-bearing, shit-stirring zealots.  As it turns out, many in the old media were of the same ilk.  Sometimes it hurts to look in the mirror.

6 – Community-based interests, be they purely cultural or geographic, are easier to satisfy using the web. Hyperlocalism in news coverage prevails on the web.  It’s what separates small, promising web publications like chroniclet.com from the behemoth one-size-fits all monsters like NYT.com.

Still, I’d rather read Time magazine that read a 5000-word piece on my iPhone.  I like my iPhone, but do I want to read that much on it?  No.

No landlines by end of Obama’s first term? Don’t hold your breath

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Like many of us, including contemporary Tom Evslin, the lust for fast fiber and quick wireless technologies has tech pundits dreaming of a day when copper lines won’t dominate the last mile of access.  Tom boldly proclaims, in the first paragraph of his post, “By the end of President Obama’s first term, there won’t be any more landlines left in the country.”

That’s quite a prediction considering how entrenched the US is in copper infrastructure, and how pokey the telcos have been about delivering fiber to the last mile. That said, I can easily counterpredict that there will be plenty of landlines left in the country by the end of Obama’s term, and if he goes eight years, there will still be plenty of good old copper dial tone.

There are several more reasons why.  First, reliable and abundant FAX-over-IP is still a dream that hasn’t been standardized to the point where consumers have a consistent manner in which to use it.  So those pesky FAX lines will be with us for some time.  Second, digital last mile services like PRI are still too expensive for the majority of subscribers, even medium-sized business with 6 – 8 phone lines, in many cases. Third, lots of monitoring equipment, like that used by fire and security systems, still requires the use of copper dial-tone because its modems are too sensitive to the use of jittery VoIP. Even managed network providers like Qwest require the use of a POTS line to monitor frame relay and MPLS equipment, and no, they don’t support monitoring this equipment digitally.

Notwithstanding an overhaul to the universal service fund (USF), the shrink in landline abundance is likely to cause a few headaches for the telcos still playing the copper game four years from now, but it’s pie in the sky to think that those lines are going to be gone.