Steve’s Tech Journal

Ampersand switched to gmail (well, google apps) last year and hasn’t looked back. This means that I can get at all my mail, calendar, contacts, etc. from any browser anywhere.  But in order to work effectively during the summer abroad I needed to monitor and respond to short term emails from anywhere — a train, a restaurant, in between museums, or while Marilyn is driving across Europe.

I use (and love) the google G1 phone on Tmobile in the US. Unfortunately, no US carriers will not give you an unlimited global email plan on gphones or iphones. But they will do it for blackberrys. Luckily Tmobile has such a plan, and they let you change from the Gphone data plan to the blackberry plan (which is the same price), for no fee, and then change back. The global email plan is a bolt-on on top of the blackberry data plan, and costs an additional $19.95 a month. So, for a total data plan cost of $44.95 I was able to get unlimited email anywhere on the planet. Blackberrys integrate to gmail / google apps really well, just follow the wizard on the blackberry, enter your gmail username and password, and everything is set up for you. It’s full push email, and is very efficient with battery usage, etc.  The only thing to beware of, is that the Tmobile global email plan only covers email usage, not any other sort of data connection (which costs up to $15 per MB). So, no web browser, no twitter apps, etc., I used the blackberry as an email only device.

Now I didn’t have a GSM blackberry, and I wanted one with a camera, so I picked up a brand new Blackberry Curve 8900 off of craigslist. A bit pricey at $300, but it’s a great tool for global travel and I can probably resell it for close to what I paid for it.  It was an adjustment moving back to a blackberry, but I carried one for years so it didn’t take long.  One thing I will say is battery life is great on the 8900.  2-3 days with regular email and phone use — far better than my G1 or my trial with the iPhone 3g.

To sum up, this decision worked perfectly, and was the saving grace of work communications.   There were times when hotel email was spotty, or we were out for the day.  But I always had my full email access right with me.    And being able to shoot pics and send them to a blog or to friends was a great plus.    The TMobile bills were as promised, no bandwidth or data roaming charges.   Perfect.

p.s. I have switched back to the G1 now that we’re home.  It’s a quick call to Tmobile support and they cheerfully changed the plan back.  I haven’t decided whether to sell the 8900 or hang onto to it for the next trip abroad.

Technorati Tags: Europe travel tech, Blackberry 8900, Tmobile blackberry plan

We interrupt this regularly scheduled series of blog posts about travel tech with some breaking news.   Noting that internet felt very crisp, I ran a speedtest the other day with the following results:

Comcast trying hard (and succeeding) to keep the author happy

Now, I was reading about LTE coming with it’s rumored 100Mbps speeds, and in some dialog over the last week with colleagues we were discussing that the cable operators are trying to ramp up bandwidth proactively, so that they’ll have less disruption once the wireless stuff really gets going.

I guess this is evidence, my last test in December showed 15 down and 1.5 up.    And it shows that competition or threats of competition do force innovation and improved service levels.    For now, I’m planning to happily enjoy my .024 Gps down and .008 up.   It’s a move in the right direction, thank you Comcast!

Technorati Tags: Comcast speed test

Section 1.0 Overview

Our family decided spend 9 weeks this summer travelling around Europe.   Since I was unable to take 9 weeks off cold turkey,  this was to be a summer working in Europe for me and partly for my wife, not a summer off, so we need to be able to communicate easily and work effectively from just about anywhere.    Our destinations included Greece, Budapest, Paris, then picking up a car in Lisbon and driving through Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Croatia.

Section 2.0 Technology and Communication Requirements

Section 2.1 Email

Americans my age still live and breathe email as a primary communication mechanism, especially for technical projects.   So above all else, I needed good email connectivity, everywhere, all the time.   I also periodically would need to download and upload large documents and read them easily.     My wife was also running a few projects and on a board committee or two, and although less urgent she needed frequent access.

Our children also use email and IM as a way to keep up with friends.    People from our town pretty much clear out during the summer, so the girls didn’t need to check email daily but every once and while they wanted to be able to send pictures to friends and see how their vacations were going.

Section 2.2 Phone Calls

Already before leaving I had 4 significant conference calls planned, two for 4 hours, two for 2 hours.   And I was the chairperson for these calls.   So this means I would need to arrange good quality inexpensive calls to the US, esp. from wherever we have broadband but occasionally also via mobile.

In addition to calls back to the states, we knew we would need to be able to make mobile calls in multiple countries, to hotels, to cabs, to friends.

And, as a family of 4 we might split up at times, and need to be able to call each other.

Section 2.3 Pictures and Video

Part of the fun for friends and colleagues back home is when you can send them a few pictures.   So we needed the ability to take some good photos and be able to record some video clips, as well as send these to friends and work colleagues.

Section 2.4 Fun

We’ll have a fair bit of travel time and down time, and it would be good to have some diversions — things to read, things to watch or play with.

Section 2.5 Backup

It would be great to be able to backup files and photos, so that if something happens to our laptops we don’t lose our data, email, documents, and pictures.

Section 3  Size and Weight Constraints

We travelled with one carry-on size luggage each, plus my briefcase, so we have limited space for managing devices, power cords, and technology.   We wanted also to be free to wander a new city without carry backpacks or large format cameras marking ourselves as obvious tourists.

END DOC

OK, so I didn’t really write a requirements document for the trip, I just did it now for your amusement.  I’m a geek, but not that much of a geek.  Here’s a pic of the four of us, with all of our luggage, at the departure terminal at Logan airport on June 24 (please ignore or chuckle quietly to yourself about the silly smile on yours truly, I think I was a little giddy about the adventure at hand   It highlights how little we really carried for 9 weeks across Europe.

Technorati Tags: Europe travel tech, summer travel tech

Steve and family with all luggage

I was fortunate enough to be able to work from Europe this summer, combining the need to earn a living with the desire to spend the summer with the family in a variety of interesting locations.    It went well, and in this day and age it’s certainly possible to do a lot given an internet connection, a laptop, and a few mobile devices.   I thought I’d update my readers on some of what worked well, and some of what didn’t.

Rather than write one monolithic post, I think I’ll split this up into a few posts on different topics:

Steve checking email in Rome

• what’s important while travelling (i.e. the requirements)
• getting to the internet
• email
• voip
• mobile
• photos and video
• backup

Stay tuned, I’ll try to put out one every other day or so.

Technorati Tags: europe travel technology

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