Crossed Wires

Vic’s Blog

Archive for category Soapbox

Nokia SIP client: WTF?

Jul 17

Posted by Vic in Soapbox, Telephony

I was having a browse around the excellent Nerd Vittles site tonight, and stumbled onto a disturbing conversation about the removal of the Nokia SIP client from S60 Third Edition Feature Pack 2 (as used on recent phones like the N78 and N96).

Nerd Vittles linked to this blog, which alludes to the possibility of mobile carriers putting pressure on Nokia to remove “free” calling capability (i.e. VoIP) from their phones.  Within the comments on that blog post comes a link to a post on Nokia Conversations (I’ve never seen that site before, but it seems to simply be a bit of a PR site…).

“Charlie” from Nokia Conversations tries to spin the changes to Nokia’s SIP support.  Firstly, in what seems to be almost believable at first he says “no, the SIP stack is still there, in fact it is actually better in FP2 than previous versions”.  Apparently, the improvements meant that the integrated VoIP client had to be dropped because it wasn’t ready.  This explanation loses credibility, however, when you see that Charlie’s blog post was made on 27 August 2008: nearly one year ago! And folks are still commenting on that thread, saying “where’s my VoIP client?”.  I cannot believe that it would take Nokia a full year to update the VoIP client and package a firmware update for these phones–especially given that two other S60 3rd-ed FP2 phones released after the N78 and N96, namely the N79 and N85, apparently do have the VoIP client!

On 8 December 2008, Charlie posts a follow-up on Nokia Conversations.  In it he says “well we made some folks unhappy, but we’ve made a fix”.  He points to something called the “SIP VoIP Settings” application that was supposed to bring back what people were asking for.  Problem is, it’s not a VoIP client at all: it’s simply a configuration tool allowing more detailed control over the configuration of a SIP profile.

In the final insult it appears that the new N97, Nokia’s current flagship also has no VoIP client.  The N97 is based on S60 5th edition and not 3rd edition, but 5th is supposedly just 3rd updated for touch-screen anyway (not a significant change in technology).

Looking more closely at the specifications pages for these N-series phones, the tiny-tiny text that says “VoIP” is missing.  It’s probably arguable therefore that Nokia never advertised the phones as having VoIP capability[1], so anyone who bought one without checking has created their own situation.  However, Nokia, why is the “upgrade” to the N95 missing one of that phone’s most popular features?

At one point Nokia’s story changes… it seems that VoIP is a function that doesn’t fit the product direction of N-series and belongs in the E-series phones (indeed both the E75 and the soon-to-be-released E72, reportedly S60 3rd-ed FP2 phones, list VoIP capability).  Why, then, do other S60 3rd-ed FP2 phones like the N79 and N85 have VoIP?

This whole “affair” seems to have been handled really poorly by Nokia.  Firstly, claim a technical limitation.  When that fails (because you discover that your users actually know something about tech), claim that your third-party providers have developed a solution.  When it turns out that the third-party products are steamers that don’t even use the infrastructure your OS provides (something you didn’t know before either), claim that the product has been “realigned” and doesn’t service that market any more–while simultaneously marketing a product in the same series with the same technology that still has the disputed feature.

I must admit to being a lot less angry about this after researching this post than when I started it.  I’m more angry about the survey I completed earlier today when I visited the Nokia website–I was very complimentary about .  My shopping-slash-wish list just lost an item–not that I was seriously contemplating buying the N97, but it’s nice to have a technical reason not to buy it rather than the boring can’t-really-justify-it line. :)

[1] Of course it’s easy to make this statement based on what the product pages look like now…

Tags: , , ,

Comments

Photo printing pain

Dec 16

Posted by Vic in Linux, Soapbox

S went to print some photos the other day, and what was supposed to have been a simple exercise turned out to be a very frustrating one for both of us. I was utterly amazed to discover that even on the eve of 2009 there are web sites that think the world is only viewed through Windows…

S's and my respective creative sides are being adequately satisfied by the iLife suite on the Mac, but there are times when we need to get the pictures out of the silver tower and onto other media—on this occasion paper, for albums and so on. A large retailer here has part of their floor space in each store set aside for those photo printing kiosks, and I introduced S to the art of putting photos onto a USB stick so that she could print some photos when next she went there…

On her return from the shop, she reported that we hadn't successfully put the photos she wanted onto the stick. When she'd plugged the stick in, she'd found only less than half of the photos we'd stored there. Sure enough, when I plugged the stick in all the files were there safe and sound. Strange thing was I could find nothing in common about the files (uppercase/mixedcase filename, long or 8.3 filename, datestamp, etc) that would have yielded the number of photos that the kiosk had found on it.

Annoying, but life is too short to worry about it. After all, this same retailer was plastering adverts of their new web-based photo printing service… S could submit the photos online for printing and pick them up from the store later.

<sarcasm>This is where the fun really started.</sarcasm>

Their app is Flash-based but seems to have some Java involved as well. While it loaded quickly enough, the app portion of the web page had an incongruous grey background that just looked dodgy. S had to create an account and sign onto the site just to get this far though, which was a bit annoying.

The workflow seemed to be to create an album, upload pictures to the album, then select photos from the album for processing. Creating the album went fine, but when the upload function was selected there were no action buttons visible to complete the operation! S was using Safari, but Firefox made no difference.

Then I suggested she use her laptop, which runs Ubuntu 8.04. The situation actually seemed a bit better to start with, as instead of the upload function showing an embedded file selection dialog like it did on the Mac we got a "normal" GNOME file dialog box. However, only some of the photos showed again: this time, it was because they had hard-coded a non-modifiable filename filter for the dialog that was only picking lower-case file extensions!

Trying to work around this, I mounted the stick manually with different mount options. I succeeded in getting all but one of the files showing with a lowercase name, and a rename fixed that one. Back in the web page however, it still didn't like us: any file chosen from the dialog box resulted in a nonsensical error message followed by a "You have selected no files to upload" dialog.

S was beyond caring by this stage (she has a very low threshold for being stuffed around by technology). She went to Snapfish after a friend's recommendation, and found a well-designed and easy to use WEB site that required no downloads or other junk.

So why did this wind me up to the point of spending all this time blogging it? Because nowhere on Big-W's site is there any mention of browser or operating system compatibility. Not even a "we've tested only on Windows, Mac users may experience difficulty"[1]. Not a blessed thing. Their Help page has a single paragraph about trouble uploading, blaming "your IT Department" for "setting certain network properties that inhibit the upload tool from working".

I wonder if the developers of the app were just so blind to believe that their gunk would just work wherever it was run, or whether they really think that it's a Windows world. Of the two I hope it's the former. ;-)

So Snapfish gets a recommendation for being not just an application hosted on the web but a web application. They do good photos too!

[1] I never expect to see Linux mentioned on these things and get pleasantly surprised on the occasions it is; even if it says "Linux is not supported", someone there at least knows enough to mention it.

Comments

Security blows

Nov 25

Posted by Vic in Linux, Soapbox

I was about to post about how pleased I was with Synergy in helping me tidy up my desktop clutter (by removing a keyboard and mouse from the surface). Ironically, I’m instead posting about a problem with the configuration that will cause me to throw it out and look for something else. Why the title? Because the default configuration of a Linux distribution nowadays has given me no way to fix this ridiculously simple problem without powering off the running PC, VMware guests and all.

The problem is that Synergy and the VMware console don’t play well together (I could have sworn that when I first started using Synergy I had no trouble with it, but there are a few hits around that describe problems like I’ve now hit). The problems people are reporting are that keys like Shift and Ctrl are not passed to the VM (some described here and here).

My problem is slightly different: the screen of my Synergy client (the one that’s running VMware) locked while a VMware guest had focus. Now, the Shift and Ctrl keys are not picked up by gnome-screensaver to unlock the screen. Even the real keyboard attached directly via USB doesn’t work. Big problem, for the following reasons:

* Thanks to password strength rules enforced on the Linux build I use, my password now has a Shift-obtained punctuation character.
* I can’t switch to a virtual console, since that requires Ctrl (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F1).

Okay, so the keyboard doesn’t work. This client machine just happens to be a tablet PC, and I had hacked gnome-screensaver (to display the onscreen keyboard to allow the screen to be unlocked in tablet mode). I grabbed the pen and tapped out my password, but it *still* didn’t work: even the output of the virtual keyboard gets the Shift modifier dropped. Hmm… Starting to fume now.

Never mind, I’ll connect via the network…

* Fedora does not start SSH by default (okay, yes, and I didn’t make sure it gets started after I’d finished the install).
* There is no remote desktop (VNC server, XDMCP) configured.
* The shiny web-based management interface on VMware Server 2.0 only listens on 127.0.0.1 (or is being blocked by the Fedora firewall).

So with no way to get access to the machine to try and fix it, a power-off is the only solution. Some readers are probably thinking “boo-hoo, diddums had to kill-switch his widdle poota, how tewwible,” but I hate having to do that; not because the system doesn’t recover, but it’s “problem resolution, Windows-style”.

Even though the real problem was between Synergy and VMware, I’m blaming the (perceived) need for security since without that I wouldn’t have a cryptic password that I can’t enter without Shift and a system I can’t administer over the network. Red Hat and Fedora doing everything in their power to ensure I don’t fall prey to nasty Internet fiends (rich analogies to governmental nannying, but that’s probably over-thinking things).

So in summary: Synergy is great, just as long as you’re not using VMware console and have a password with punctuation or uppercase… Remember to have your SSH or other network access enabled before you play!

Tags: , , , ,

Comments

Scourges of the Universe: Blog Spam, and ISPs

Nov 10

Posted by Vic in Soapbox

If you can read this, it means that Round 3 of my fight with my ISP is over and my ADSL is back up, which is a good thing because it means that I can tell you about why my ClustrMaps image has so many red dots on it suddenly…

Every so often I found that some random junk would show up in comments to my blog posts. When I saw it I’d just delete it, and it didn’t occur often so I didn’t really think much of it.

This was until I spied a comment that I actually needed to reply to, and found I couldn’t. I started looking at why the record number of the comment was so high, and found that my blog of little-more than 100 entries had become home to over 13000 items of blog-spam. :(

I blame myself, obviously, as the software I use had introduced spam-filtering techniques a couple of versions ago and I hadn’t kept up.

In cleaning up the garbage, behind the red mist of rage I saw at having my blog being violated so, I noted something interesting. The issue had been going on for some time, and I realised that in front of me, in my humble little blog, I had a snapshot of the evolution of blog-spam.

The early stuff was primitive, and easily identified by querying for the names of erectile dysfunction drugs and other medications. The later stuff was harder and harder to detect until I was virtually picking it record-by-record out of the database. Some of it made absolutely no point to me at all: strings of random alphabetics with not even a URL in sight; maybe this was a worm just looking for the kudos of a DOS.

The thought occurred to me that perhaps I should have kept it, in much the same way as someone I know keeps copies of PC viruses and worms in a little (hopefully isolated) folder. Then I realised two things:

* Preserving something, or putting it in a museum, gives it some legitimacy. I don’t want to legitimise blog-spam; and

* The art (if any) in blog-spam is in the code that generates it, not in the crap it leaves behind.

As for all the hits on my ClustrMap, I figure 80% are the spambots infecting the blog and about 19% are the poor folk that got drawn to my site as a result of the spam. I had been thinking of a different blog platform, perhaps this episode shows that I need something a little harder.

Of course another way to fight blog-spam is to get your network disconnected from the ‘Net, and my ever-so-unfriendly ISP went out of their way to do that for me this weekend. Unsolicited, of course, which is even better. On a Friday afternoon, too — better still, as if you do actually manage to get someone on the phone it’s too late for them to find anyone who can do anything about it (apparently).

Recommendations of a good ADSL ISP accepted: although keep it to yourself if your ISP’s called wwkjukhkkjlpuggh or qjkdfsdfaksjkulkfhg… :)

Tags: , ,

Comments

On being an early-adopter

Sep 2

Posted by Vic in Life, Soapbox

I like new things. Many of my friends and colleagues do as well. Some of us are very familiar with “early adopter tax”, the high price of paying for a new release product or program in spite of the knowledge that delaying the purchase would save money. I got to thinking about early-adoption a little while ago, and came to somewhat of an epiphany: nothing to do with shiny gadgets or cool software, either…

Some months ago I was in an IRC channel with a group of folks in the team I was working with at the time. The conversation had come around to green electricity, what deals our respective electricity companies were offering, and whether we were “doing the right thing” and selecting green energy.

I was a nay-sayer. “It’s a scam,” I railed. “Why should I pay extra for green power when the electricity companies know they should be doing that anyway?” The conversation turned to subsidies for installing solar power systems, and soon after that we actually got back to work. :)

Months later I recalled that conversation while listening to a podcast. The presenter was discussing climate change and the need for urgent action, whatever the cost. Which is when it hit me: green energy and it’s friends are like an early-adopter tax for a sustainable future.

In the early 90s, I remember models of the IBM ThinkPad would cost A$12k and more. Twelve THOUSAND dollars! Over time however, the developments in the technology have led to such remarkable improvements that a modern laptop can be had for a fraction of that amount, and projects like OLPC becoming viable. None of it wold have happened, however, if early-adopters had not backed the IBMs, Compaqs, and Toshibas (and the Osbornes before that, bless them) and supported the idea.

In 1978, when Mercedes-Benz first fitted ABS to the S-Class[1], I expect they would have wanted to make it at least an option on all their vehicles. That they didn’t, when the cost of doing so would have been astronomical, ensured that they were able to viably continue research and development on the technology and bring the cost down over time. Together with other car makers who progressively did the same, they ensured that even a modern $10k car can have access to such technology, but again it wouldn’t have happened if not for those S-Class buyers validating the idea and stumping-up the cash.

I’ve realised that businesses don’t have a conscience, and that the current economic model cannot reward a company for “knowing what it should be doing”. In quite a real way, companies need their customers to be their conscience by supporting those products that make a contribution to society, and rejecting products that are damaging or harmful. Longer-term, those companies that “get it” will thrive while those that don’t will fail.

So my consideration on things like green electricity changed to, simply, “can we afford to?”. Knowing that in around three months I’ll be meeting my second child (all going well), and becoming maudlin about the state of the world that a new person is being brought into (as new parents sometimes are wont to do), perhaps the question should be “can we afford NOT to?”…

[1] Other manufacturers fitted ABS systems to cars earlier than 1978, but they seemed to be one-off decisions that were inconsistently implemented or met with commercial failure. Mercedes-Benz, once the decision was made, stuck with it.

Tags: ,

Comments

Umbrellas like Canberra

Aug 31

Posted by Vic in Life, Soapbox

Or at least the ones bought there do. In my travels to Canberra I’ve now bought two compact travel umbrellas and lost *both* of them within a week of purchase. Seems like an umbrella bought in Canberra really wants to stay in Canberra — the last one lost was liberated by someone who sought to relieve me of a burden at the x-ray screening at Canberra Airport. To that someone, if you’re reading: I’d rather have kept the umbrella, thanks, and you could have asked me before you liberated it from me…

Tags: ,

Comments

Whither Twitter

Jun 17

Posted by Vic in Soapbox

I really don’t use Twitter much at all. It’s one of those things, like Facebook, that I just signed up to more-or-less on a whim. But with all the stability and performance problems they’ve been having recently (and the flak they’ve been taking in the press, I understand) I’m hoping that they pull through. You have to wonder though, when their Status Blog gets a post entitled “Odd whales”…

Odd whales

We're seeing a number of whales pop up around the site, especially on profile pages. We're aware of the issue and working on it now.

Update: site back up and mostly whale free.

Bizarre — but maybe if I was a more regular user it would make more sense. ;-)

Unfortunately my visibility of their problems started when they shut off their IM functionality — unfortunate because at around the same time I had done an upgrade of my Jabber server and blamed the upgrade for not being able to connect to Twitter. Hours of fruitless config checking and Googling finally led me to the aforementioned Twitter Status Blog and the news that IM had been disabled. Ever since then (two or three weeks ago) IM function has been the “number one priority to get restored”…

I’m not complaining. It’s a service I barely use, and one I’ve never paid for. I can appreciate people getting upset however; as someone who does have trouble keeping in touch with friends and family, if I had gotten more used to it I’m sure I’d be one of those complaining.

Doom-and-gloom time… Part of the flak Twitter has been copping is around the design of their systems (virtually no redundancy or scalability) — if this is systemic to Web 2.0 startups and the investors and venture-capitalists catch on, things could get ugly FAST. Are we set for a repeat of Dot-Bomb? Could Twitter be the first victim of an impending burst of the Web 2.0 bubble?

I hope it comes back. Twitter is a nice way to see what folks are doing, and it’s a reminder of the fact that there are people out there. :) Perhaps I’ll even make a bit more use of it, if it can get its IM groove back on. Good luck folks, and watch out for the whales…

Tags:

Comments

Annoying cliche of the week

Jun 13

Posted by Vic in Soapbox

If I see or hear one more reference to something being a “perfect storm” I think I’m going to be sick.

Tags:

Comments

Are we letting Microsoft define our industry?

Mar 10

Posted by Vic in Operating Systems, Soapbox

I’ve been trying to solve a problem at work for a few weeks now — one of those tricky “it’s only software so it shouldn’t be this hard” sort-of problems for which you know the solution is just a matter of putting the right bits and pieces together. At work, I’m more-or-less forced into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the distro formerly known as RHEL), and one of the pieces I’m looking at is OpenLDAP.

My first stage in the process was to get OpenLDAP set up with the right config — but when I started it, slapd complained about an error in slapd.conf. The overlay I was trying to use, it claimed, was not found. I spent the next couple of hours trying to find additional packages, trying different things, reading doco, searching Google, to no avail. The overlay I want is missing from Red Hat’s build of OpenLDAP.

So “boo hoo”, you say, “just build from source”. Well, remember how I said I was forced into RHEL? The corollary to that is that I am only allowed to use exactly what the Shadowman ships on the DVD. No build-from-source, no other OSS, is allowed.

But what does any of this have to do with Microsoft?

In my research, I found the release notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. In it was the following text (highlighting mine):

OpenLDAP Server and Red Hat Directory Server
Red Hat Directory Server is an LDAP-based server that centralizes enterprise and network data into an OS-independent, network-based registry. It is set to replace OpenLDAP server components, which will be deprecated after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. For more information about Red Hat Directory Server, refer to http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/directory/.

You guessed it: Red Hat Directory Server is a pay-for product. So Red Hat’s setting a direction here: server platforms comprising only the base OS, and additional function provided through extra-cost modules — now where have we seen this before?

Does this now mean that on RHEL-next, in order to run a Samba server with an LDAP IDMAP backend, companies will have to pay for RDS? That won’t fly at my work: “we already have a corporate directory, we’re not paying for another” will the customer sayeth.

“Okay”, you say, “so don’t use Red Hat”. As far as I’m allowed (this is at my employer remember) the only other choice is SLES… from Novell… that organisation that felt the need to cross-licence with Microsoft to “protect” against undisclosed and unproven patent infringement.

(Note that this post is not about Novell-Microsoft, nor is their deal a reason not to use SLES in my opinion. The thought only popped into my head because I was already thinking about Microsoft as a result of the Red Hat thing with RDS.)

So it seems like the two biggest names in corporate Linux are marching to Microsoft’s drum. Have I misread something? Am I overreacting?

Tags: , ,

Comments

Telstra service

Feb 1

Posted by Vic in Soapbox

I have to say that over the last couple of years I have only had good dealings with Telstra. Ironically though, the most recent example is about the only service I have with them, and they want to take it away. You see ISDN is outdated technology that is holding Telstra back from delivering new services, and they want me to replace my ISDN line with shiny new analogue phone lines. So says a letter I received late last year…

I have a service that Telstra calls “ISDN Home Highway”. Its original purpose was to give “broadband” Internet connectivity to places that were unable to get ADSL, but it was still a normal ISDN basic-rate phone service with a special NTU that included a modem (serial and USB attached) for data connectivity. Data calls to Bigpond (Telstra’s ISP division) were subsidised, and local phone calls were cheaper as well (AU$0.175 instead of the “normal” AU$0.25). The best bit though was actually the price: by the time you option up a normal PSTN line from Telstra with caller-id and other stuff you’re looking at something like AU$40 per month — Home Highway was AU$45 per month which includes both B-channels and two DIDs (so basically the equivalent of two phone lines, ISDN standard, for only a fraction more than one analogue line).

Like I said though, Telstra sent a letter last year advising that they were removing the ISDN Home Highway service. There’s this thing called “BigPond Broadband ADSL” that I could use instead of my ISDN service, apparently. It seems that they believe that the only reason people got ISDN Home was for Internet access, and now that ADSL is available in more places that ISDN shouldn’t be necessary any more.

There are a number of flaws in their reasoning, however, not the least of which is the fact that I had ISDN Home because it’s an ISDN voice service! If they had done a bit more homework, they’d know that we already have ADSL — there’s another service coming into the house, an analogue line that is there for the sole purpose of ADSL provision.

My alternatives were looking like replacing the ISDN Home service with an ISDN Business service. From Telstra’s point of view, it’s non-productive, as it defeats the purpose of them trying to get people off this “legacy” ISDN equipment — I just switch to a different type of service, forcing them to keep the ISDN gear. It just doesn’t make sense. Of course I could also switch to VoIP, but without number portability (yet) it’s a pain that I wasn’t looking forward to (not only that but my employer currently has a prohibition on work calls going over VoIP).

So why is this a positive dealing with Telstra? Because I got a phone call from a lass from Telstra this morning to ask me about whether I got the letter and how I felt about it. As I described my displeasure, she made attentive noises at me and took notes (well, she said she was taking notes). She said that they’ve only just started ringing people about it, and that there was a possibility that enough people making comments like mine might force a change.

It’s a positive thing right now because it’s the first time I’ve been given the impression that Telstra gives a stuff about a customer. It can’t be cheap to have people sitting, calling people, and potentially wearing abuse from people who they intend to displace. I never thought I’d say this, especially after the abhorrent BACk campaign (in which they tried to gain public support to fight against Optus in their bid to change a broadband access environment thet Telstra themselves created), but kudos to Telstra for at least asking the little guy what he thinks.

Let’s see if it ends positively though. :)

Tags:

Comments