Steve’s Tech Journal

This is a test post to make sure functionality is working after a server move.

Yep, we’d been hosting with The Planet for a long time, 5+ years.    The system was strong, but we got a few releases behind on Fedora and we were worried the disks were getting old and creaky.     So, after one failed attempt here we are, on a VM with the excellent linnode guys.      Running Ubuntu Jaunty.  Don’t need much to run our public server, and a slice of a machine can handle it.

When I’m sure we’re fully cutover, I’ll offer my thoughts on the experience, and on the viability of exporting public-facing servers to the virtualized cloud in this fashion.   But first I’d better make sure it all works.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linode

I’ve written in the past about voiceglue, our open source project to integrate Asterisk telephony with openVXI VXML.    Well, today we put out a new version that represents a pretty significant upgrade.

Details about the release are on the voiceglue site, so I won’t repeat them here.   And we put a formal PR piece about Voiceglue 0.9 up on the Ampersand News site, so none of that here either.

But what I will tell you is that this release has been keeping us busy, especially in the last 45 days, and represents a real step forward for the stability and functionality of the platform.   On the surface, it may seem like only a handful of new features were added, but the real effort was behind the scenes.

Prior versions of voiceglue worked well on Fedora, but users were left to their own devices to figure out how to install it on other distros.   Our goals for this version were to support the project on a number of dimensions to broaden the platform’s usability:

• Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10, Fedora 9 and 10
• 32-bit and 64-bit versions
• Asterisk 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6

This was a bit of an undertaking, and to tackle it we funded a new screaming-fast quad core system that supports a large number of virtual environments.    We also invested time in developing a suite of regression tests and automated testing, to allow us to quickly assess whether the codebase is functioning properly on all of these environments.

Big kudos to Doug on all this, my major contribution has been helping with planning and things like adding the voiceglue wiki.   And kudos to the small but growing user community, which has contributed ideas, which has suggested solutions, and which has provided us patches and additional documentation. 

It’s exciting to see the project begin to take off, and we now have a solid development environment on which to base further improvements and extensions.

Technorati Tags: voiceglue, open source VXML, asterisk VXML, open source IVR

Jeff Pulver has been running a very fun series of networking breakfasts the last year or so.   The locations vary and he hits many major western cities around the world at least once a year.    I’ve wanted to go for a long time, but always seemed to have schedule conflicts.

But I was finally able to get to the January 22 Boston Breakfast at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge, MA.  Lot’s of familiar faces, and it was great to catch up with Jeff, Brough, Geo and lots of folks from the Boston social media scene.    And hey, I even had my few secs of fame in Steve Garfields 27 people one question video.

It’s a “social media” breakfast, because you wear a label with your status line, in my case “I like to keep things in balance”, but there were other great ones in the room, including “visitor from the future” and Jeff’s “the person you’re about to meet may change your life”.  Jeff explains it in the Social Media Breakfast Toolkit Video.

The status lines make for great conversation starters, avoiding that awkward part of many of these things where you are greeted with “so, what do you do?”.

After you chat with people for awhile, you can “tag” each other to categorize them.   Pretty quickly I collected a set of tags including “voip”, “cycling”, “Italy”, “pioneer”, etc.   I had a few more but a lot of them fell off (better stickies plz).

What a unique and fun way to run a networking event.     I remember talking with Jeff a few years back about online paradigms that could be ported to the real world, and I have to hand it to him for giving this a try and for the great event that it turns out to be.

UPDATE, Jeff’s got his photo album up, including your fearless author.

Technorati Tags: social media breakfast, jeff pulver

You know that twitter is over when marketing conferences feature sessions advising businesses to use twitter for advertising and the mainstream media NY Times starts running “how to” articles.    Tech columnist David Pogue’s article titled “Twittering Tips for Beginners” has comments such as:

• “Twitter.com is all the rage among geeks” — hmmm, maybe in 2007?
• “I’ve been Twittering for a couple of months, and I’ve learned a lot”
• “some people, like Guy [Kawasaki], use automated software robots to churn out tweets, largely to promote their own blogs, sites or other products”

(my) snarkiness aside,  it’s a decent introductory piece with a nice section advising people on some tools like twitterrific and also explaining his sense of how to best get value of of twitter (hint: not by tweeting “I’m eating lunch now”).

I was chatting with a pal over the holidays who said that twitter has become a performance space ever since they broke the privacy model.  Isn’t that how all these things go.   When any social media starts, if you’re in the first wave, there’s a period of time when you can be yourself, and you know who roughly who might be listening.    By the time your boss, and your bosses boss, and another boss further up are all following you, your ability to be candid is gone.

Me, I stopped twittering when they disabled IM access.   I don’t keep a cell phone handy all the time so no SMS, and couldn’t be bothered to go to the website.     I suppose one day I should go install tweet deck or twitterific and get back in the flow.   But, and it may be that I don’t know what I’m now missing, but a tweet-less life doesn’t seem so bad.

Technorati Tags: twitter is over

Perhaps it’s because with the new year I moved to a new email system.   With a nice shiny new empty mailbox.   It’s inspired me to start cleaning up the crud that fills my inbox these days.  And you know, google apps’s spam control is pretty good, not much true spam is getting through.  In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single piece since we cutover on Dec 31.

But, somehow I’ve found my way onto a million mailing lists in the 16 years I’ve had this address.   IT journal this, online marketer that, every site I’ve ever done business with or contacted seems to send me daily, weekly, or infrequent emails.   Newsletters, special air fares, info about this, info about that.   And, I don’t want any of it, or, I want only a very little bit of it.

In the brave new world of the late 00s, most online publishers are very good about an unsubscribe button.  The Email Sender and Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group both publish guidelines and work to “fight spam while protecting the delivery of legitimate email”.  Bravo.   What this means is that most of these mailing list emails I griped about in the last paragraph have a little unsubscribe button at the bottom, which usually goes to a third party provider that promptly takes one off a mail list.

Man I must be hitting buttons like these 20 time a day, grinning all the while.  And, my volume is starting to go down.   It’s fun.    So, if you haven’t made a new years resolution yet, help me in my quest: lets save some of the worlds bits that are wasted by needless emails.  Pledge to unsubscribe from unwanted email lists.

Technorati Tags: unsubscribe

Well, it does for me anyway.    A month back I wrote that I was trialing both the iphone and the g1 (aka google phone) side by side, as a candidate replacement to my blackberry.  

Bottom line:  I’ll be carrying the g1.   The iPhone is a beautiful device, but with my usage the battery runs out in ¾ of a day, and I just can’t type efficiently on the soft keyboard.     But, as a consolation prize, I will be buying and using an iTouch to complement my g1 for tunes, videos and when wifi is likely to be available (Andy’s ahead of me here and I wholeheartedly agree with his comments).

Those with short attention spans can move on.  Here are some of my detailed observations:

1.       Mail – the G1 likes to integrate with gmail if you want push email.   It lets you label, star, and archive messages from the mobile device, same as online gmail.  Now, for corporate use you have to switch your domain to google, $50 per user per year.    I’m in a position to do this and a main driver for my experiment was to see if I can eliminate Exchange and the entailed Microsoft bloatware.    I’ve been using the gmail interface with Chrome as a brower, it’s fast, smart, and searches are instantaneous.  I really like it.   The iphone will integrate with Exchange for push email, but you can’t use Apple’s mobile me unless you can do business as user@me.com.   I don’t want to do that, and I want Exchange out of my life.   Winner: G1

2.       Keyboard – I just can’t be efficient on the iPhone.     Even if I let it triangulate on the word I mean.  Even if I slide my finger to the right letter after a bad first try.  Even with the tricks to get the punctuation done quickly.    (I’ve watched all the apple videos and spent time practicing).  Sure it’s useable to a certain degree.   But if I have a 5 minute window while waiting for the kids in which to write a 6 paragraph work email, it doesn’t cut it.   The G1 keyboard, on the other hand, is great.  For awhile I kept trying to use the blackberry tricks, like press and hold a letter to capitalize it.  But then I got used to the fact that it’s a full keyboard unlike the blackberry.  No hunting to find the at sign.   Period and comma where you expect them.   It’s fast.   Winner:  G1

3.       Battery – They are well-trained at the ATT store and clearly they know this is an issue.  The rep took my phone and disabled wifi for me and turned the screen setting way down before I even held my new iPhone in my hand.   Even so, my battery was dead by 3pm every day.   I learned to keep the USB charger cable attached to my laptop and plug in the iPhone in every chance I got.   That kinda worked, but you know I’d leave the phone on the desk while walking down the hall and miss a call.  The battery life simply isn’t adequate.  This is a deal killer for me and I think would be for most professionals, there’s no point to an otherwise great communication device if it’s out of juice when you need it.    The g1 makes it about a day and half for me, or two days of light use.  Winner:  G1

4.       Touch screen and accelerometer.  The iPhone is beautiful to use.  Switches move like switches and make the right sounds.   The accelerometer automatically changes screen orientation, and pops the screen on if you take the phone from your ear to enter a DTMF digit.   It behaves exactly as you would expect and hope for (with one minor nit, you can’t change screen orientation in the mail app for some unknown reason).    The g1 is not as mature, take the phone from your ear and you have to unlock the now dark screen by hitting the menu button.   Change orientation of the device, it doesn’t change the screen.     Winner:  iPhone

5.       Contacts – Both work, both sync to their online version (gmail for g1, or exchange or mobile me for the iPhone).   You can call, email, sms from a contact with both.   You can have photos for both.   Finding a contact is about equally easy.    The iPhone gets a small edge for aesthetics.   Winner: it’s a draw.

6.       Calendar – The iphone has the edge here, in the that the online google calendar isn’t the best.   But, the calendar does work fine on the mobile device, and I may look into using sunbird as a cal client for gmail.    Winner:  iPhone (this category is my compromise)

7.       Browser.    The apple pinch and spread is nice, as is the auto flip of screen orientation.  With the G1, if you want to zoom in or out on a web page, touch the page and find the zoom + or – icons.   Both keep multiple pages open for you (e.g. tabs).    Both 3g networks seemed about the same speed in downloading and rendering pages (that is to say, both are slower than I’d really like).     Winner:   Draw

8.       Media – I loaded all of my itunes into the iPhone.   It looks slick, sounds great.   I played some videos.  I could buy almost anything from itunes and get it over 3g (well, if it didn’t drain my battery that is).    I didn’t experiment as much with the g1, I’m not looking for a mobile entertainment device.  But I’m sure it’s not as well done as the iPhone.   So the iPhone would win this category, but … Winner:  Don’t Care

9.       Carrier – it’s trite to dislike ATT policies, but nonetheless I do.  My views on net freedom are well documented in this blog so I’ll move on.  I’m not sure what exactly TMobile’s position is on this, probably no better but since they’re a smaller player in the US they’re not so ambitious about making the internet a pay-per-view walled garden experience.    Price is about the same on both carriers.   International roaming charges suck on both carriers (nasty for those like me that go to Canada from time to time).    I could, should, and probably will do some more analysis here, but for now … Winner:   Draw

10.   Apps – well, we all know about the large number of iphone apps, it’s gone mainstream.  Now, I’ve been quite happy with what I’ve found at the google app store, including an ssh terminal emulator, some device monitoring stuff, shazaam, etc..   I have noticed that most of what I downloaded for the g1 is free, whereas most apps that I was interested in cost money on the iphone.   I’m not so sure that this is a good thing.  I mean, who doesn’t like free, but a development community has to earn money somehow in order to thrive and grow.   Winner: not sure

11.   Navigation app – it’s fun to watch the blue dot move on the iPhone, and the real-time traffic that colors roads based upon delays is killer.    G1 can only update your position if you hit the location icon, and has no traffic capability.  Winner:  iPhone

12.   Alarm clock:   the dang G1 can’t wake itself up from power down.   Go ahead, set an alarm, just don’t turn the phone off because you will not be awakened.   I used to be able to use my blackberry as my alarm clock while travelling, so this is a compromise for travelling.  (Please fix this google).  The iPhone doesn’t have this problem.  Winner:  iPhone.

13.   OS and platform – don’t know how much I’ll play around as a developer, but the fact that Android is open source and Linux-based is a huge plus in my book.   I think we’ll see a lot of leverage for the platform given the easy portability of the enormous body of open source software to the Android  - translating into short development times for interesting applications.  Winner: G1

OK, that’s my analysis.  I’m acting on it, my ATT iPhone has been returned and the account cancelled.    The corporate gmail account is up in test mode and should be live before we see the end of 2008.     The pain will be uploading old email, syncing calendars, etc., but this is a good time of year to get that done.  

Happy New Year!

-          Steve

Technorati Tags: iPhone, g1, android, iPhone vs. G1, G1 vs. iPhone