Making the switch to computer-based calling

I have been a user of Vonage for my main business line for at least four years and mostly a happy customer. But a series of anticipated moves this summer got me thinking: do I really need this service any longer? And so I have come up with a rather strange plan, so stick with me here for a minute while I explain how I got to my post-VOIP mobile telephony world.

I spend about $60 a month for my business telephone service: half on Vonage, half on AT&T for providing DSL service to my home (which I share for both home and business connectivity). This summer I will be moving across town and splitting off my office into a separate location. First I thought I would just get a cable modem and move the Vonage box and line over to run on that. That is the beauty of tying your business line to a VOIP service: it can move with you. Plus, with the cable downloads at 10 Mb, I can get those mission-critical movies and other image files that are so important to my day-to-day work life.

But the more I pondered that situation, the more I thought I would be better off if I got one of the AT&T broadband PC modems and used my computer for all my outbound calls. The modems are free with rebates and a two-year service plan, and you pay $60 a month for unlimited Internet access. Some of them are USB so can work with desktops, laptops, Macs or Windows. This is the same $60 a month that I was paying for my business line. The downside is that I won’t get anywhere near 10 Mb downloads, but that might cut back on the opportunities to view unneeded visual content.

I am already a big fan of Skype, and they offer an unlimited Skype Out subscription for less than $3 a month to everyplace that I would call with the Vonage account for the most part (you can get more expensive packages if you want to call international places). You can also purchase an inbound number for Skype for a few more dollars a month, but the number of people calling me doesn’t justify this, yet.

There are a couple of important caveats to note here. First, I make a lot of calls to conferencing services, so I need to be able to continue to dial touch tones after the initial call goes through. With Skype, this isn’t a problem: you get a cute little keypad that you can type in your conference number and PIN and away you go.

Second, more importantly, I no longer will be using the actual telephone that has been sitting on my desk for the past 16 years. Granted, this phone has been in many difference cities, and at the beginning of its life was used on New York Telephone where I was paying something like two cents a minute for local calls. The more I thought about my solution, the more I began to miss this old friend and desk totem. As a friend of mine said, it is like you have to clean out the last boxes from your old bedroom at your parents’ house. I will miss the concept of this old Ma Bell ringy-dingy most of all — even though it doesn’t serve any current purpose in my new post-VOIP life.

I don’t mind the headset, and in fact I have a whole passel of Bluetooth headsets that should work on my Mac and Windows PCs for the calls, if I don’t want to use the wired one.

But the third issue is the most important one. To make this trick work, I would need to port my existing Vonage number over to one of my wireless phones. The only way to know if you can do this is to go into an AT&T company-owned store (there are other franchise stores that look exactly the same so it pays to call their support line and find out) and ask them if it is eligible for porting.

I called my local AT&T store and first was told they couldn’t port any Vonage numbers. Then after I persisted, they said I could and just stop by. So far so good.

So what I have in mind is extreme mobility: I should be able to make calls anywhere I have my laptop, as long as I have AT&T broadband service (which should be in most of the major cities I am in). This also has the extra advantage that I am not trying to find Wifi service or have to pay extra when I am in a hotel or airport, because usually those places have wireless broadband. If not, I can use my cell phone, which will be my primary business line. And under the worse case scenario, I can carry an Ethernet cable (remember those) and a phone card and use a payphone!

I am interested in your experiences with the AT&T broadband PC cards, so leave a comment on my Strominator.com blog if you don’t mind. Do you think I am crazy, to contemplate doing this? I think it is kinda exciting.

Anatomy of the YouTube-Pakistan February block

The good folks at RIPE, the European Internet research agency, have put together a fascinating analysis of what happened earlier this year when the Pakistan Telecom tried to hijack the IP address space of YouTube and divert traffic to its own servers. They even have some nice animations of what happened here on their site.

Choosing the right email listserv

I am doing a seminar tonight here in St. Louis that talks about how to use blogs and other Internet tools for self-published authors. And one of the first things that I wanted to talk about has to do with email lists. Ironic, but the underpinning of Web 2.0 is something so old that we take it for granted.

Email is at the core of just about anything else that you do on the Web: it is the primary notification mechanism for Facebook et al. when you make changes to your site. It is the way these social sites find your network of contacts, and the way that you keep your audience informed of what you are doing, too. You can have the best Web site going, but you need to remind people about what you have on it. Ironically, that was the original reason that I started Web Informant lo’ those many years ago.

Why bother with an email list when you can just send out a bunch of emails from your desktop? Several reasons: First, you get a more professional means of communication that can manage all the bounces and mistaken reply-to-everyone situations. Your desktop program isn’t designed to send out a message to hundreds or thousands of recipients either, while the list servers are. You also don’t have to reveal all your subscribers in the “To:” field, which I still see from certain PR people. (Hey, thanks for sending me your contact list! I will be sure to take note of whom you think are my colleagues.) Finally, a list server or list provider can manage unsubscribes automatically, as well as post your messages in an archive that is available online for anyone to review.

Over the years I have used many different technologies to maintain this humble email list, so I have had some experience with the technology. If you are starting a new list, you have three basic choices: the free, the cheap, and the pricey. While price alone is a good way to decide, there are some other reasons that are less obvious. Let’s talk about a few typical providers for each category: Google and Yahoo Groups (free), Mailman hosted by EMWD.com for $4 a month and iContact. If you don’t want to read how to do this and want to watch one of my screencast videos that actually shows you the process, go on over to http://yourpersonalgeek.tv now.

No matter what method you choose, you will need to assemble all your email addresses that you want to start your list with. You can export these from your email program into a text file, and then bring up the file in a word processor program. The first time that you do this is painful, no doubt. You have to cull through all your correspondence, and I guarantee you that many of your addresses will be outdated, given how quickly people change jobs these days.

For free list servers, I like Yahoo Groups. It offers a lot of control, easy list management, and the Web-based control screens are easy to understand and figure out where things are located. There is one big downside, though — the ability to set up large lists quickly. Yahoo only lets you add 10 people a day to your list without asking them to opt-in. To get around this, you can use Google Groups, which supports lists up to 500 names. Google Groups has fewer features though. I use Yahoo Groups for supporting many community lists that I maintain.

To get started, go to groups.google.com or groups.yahoo.com and click on the create a new group button at the top of the page and fill out the form. You can cut and paste the email addresses from your master list right in the Web form and you are ready to go. With both Google and Yahoo, you have a few parameters that you want to make sure you set correctly in terms of who can join your list and how they see messages from you. I suggest you experiment with just a few names as a test before you add the entire list so you can get the hang of things.

Mailman is a more professional program and gives you all sorts of control over the message and recipients, and it is what I currently use for this list. I recommend the provider EMWD.com – there are others but they are more expensive. You need to obtain an account for $10, and this will give you access via the Web to a series of control screens, fill-in forms, and zillions of parameters. This is more complex than Google, but you have more control.  As I said, each list only costs $4 a month to operate. You need to set up a subdomain that points to their list server, and you can usually do that with your registrar’s control panels.

But this may not be fancy enough for your purposes. If you want to add Web links in your emails and track who clicks on which link, such as for promotional purposes, then you want iContact. I personally don’t like rich HTML emails but I know many of you want this, so I mention it here. The cheapest plan is $10 a month for up to 500 names. If you have 2500 names, the fee increases to $30 a month.  The more names, the more you pay a month. The advantage of iContact is that you can send out very snazzy emails, with pictures, color, and links to Web sites, and maintaining lists is all they do. You don’t have to mess with setting up domains or servers, either. And like the others, everything is set up with a series of Web forms that are fairly easy, with lots of control over how the newsletter will look like.

So there you have it. Good luck with your list.

4 GB: The next RAM barrier

Back in the early days of DOS, we had a memory barrier of 640 kB of memory. I know, it seems quaint now, something that you can find on the chipsets of audio greeting cards rather than real computers, but we spent a lot of time juggling applications to fit in that space. We had special hardware cards that could address more memory, and swapping programs (remember Quarterdeck?) that could allow us to run bigger apps. (And for those of us that are really old, we even remember the 64 kB barrier of the earliest Apple // computers!)

Now we are approaching another memory barrier, only this time it is 4 GB. That is the biggest amount of memory that 32-bit processors can access. It is a problem particularly for servers and has this eerie sense of déjà vu all over again for me.

Four gigs seemed like a lot of memory just a few years ago. We didn’t really need to worry, and our desktop operating systems seemed comfortable inside it. Then Microsoft got greedy with Vista, RAM got much cheaper and apps got bigger. Before you knew it, we are once again running out of headroom.

What is driving these bigger applications is the popularity of both virtualization and database servers. Virtualization is especially memory-intensive. If you want to take advantage of this technology, you have to bulk up your machine with lots of memory and disk. And the more RAM you throw at database servers, the happier they are.

Another big consumer of RAM is the video card and how it interacts with system memory. Some of them share their memory space with the PC, which means when you are running graphics-intense operations, you take away some of that RAM from all your applications. Again, we’ve heard this tune before. And most of us haven’t really paid much attention to the video card in our servers, because we didn’t think they needed much horsepower there. After all, we weren’t planning on running GTA4 on our servers, right?

There are solutions: run the 64-bit versions of Windows, or Linux, or even the Mac OS, which can address memory beyond 4 gigs quite nicely. This is nothing new on the Mac or Linux side, which has had 64-bit OSs for many years. Indeed, if you go back into the early 1990s, we had DEC Alphas and Silicon Graphics’ Irix and all sorts of workstations that were 64-bit processors and 64-bit OSs. Some apps are now only available in 64-bit versions, such as Microsoft Exchange 2007. Others, like Oracle 11g, are still available for both 32- and 64-bit versions.

The problem is with Windows, and particularly finding the right 64-bit drivers for these machines. Rewriting drivers isn’t sexy stuff, and generally the province of some very talented coders that are dedicated enough to stick to the project. One engineering manager I spoke to told me it took his team six months to rewrite his driver set, and it wasn’t a fun six months at that. “Microsoft’s driver signing requirements are intense, he told me. “And at the time we were engaged with them, they were adding and changing tests during the process without informing us, which increased the dev cycles and cost.”

This driver issue is tricky, because you don’t usually think about all of them that you need to upgrade when you are looking at your server portfolio, and generally you don’t know what you need until you install a test machine and see what isn’t supported. Then the fun begins.

So take some time to plan out your strategy if you are running out of RAM. Take a closer look at the new Windows Server 2008 64-bit version, and whether it will run on your existing hardware. And while you are at it, look at Apple’s X Serve too: it might be a lower-cost alternative to running all those virtual machines on a true 64-bit platform.

(this appeared in Baseline Magazine this week)

Pat McGovern

For the past year, Paul Gillin and have been doing a series of weekly podcasts about new media and PR. We have renamed it MediaBlather and this week we have the privilege of speaking to Pat McGovern, chairman of International Data Group and the world’s most successful technology media executive. McGovern today oversees a $3 billion global media empire that spans more 90 countries and reaches more than 220 million people.

Amidst the constant churn in the information technology market, IDG has patiently grown and adapted through a philosophy of diversification, reader service and global expansion. In this interview, McGovern discusses:

• How the economics of electronic media make it a better business model than print;
• How Scandinavia and Asia are the leading the way in Internet innovation;
• How IDG’s experience with taking a business unit public convinced him of the value of keeping the company private;
• IDG’s new “Internet-first” strategy;
• How investments in Chinese entrepreneurs has transformed IDG’s business.

Pat McGovern’s success demonstrates the power of staying focused, adapting to change, experimenting and sticking with a long-term vision. You can listen to him and download the podcast here.

Understanding contributions to the Linux kernel

Since 2005, more than 3700 individual developers have contributed their time towards modifications of the Linux kernel operating system. A recent report here shows exactly how far and how fast that project has come, and the extent that Linux has become the province of corporations such as IBM, Novell, Red Hat and others. Since 2005, the community of developers has actually doubled, but new releases continue to appear every 100 days or so,. This is quite the opposite of major OS projects that are under the control of a single (or smaller number of) company such as Windows, OS/2, and DOS. Here is the chart from the study that shows the breakdown by company affiliation. None means the collection of individual developers who have volunteered their time, while unknown could be a corporate sponsor or an individual.

SQL injection in the news again

It amazes me (almost) to see the latest news of thousands of Web sites that have been compromised with one of the oldest tricks in the book: SQL Injection. It is almost ridiculously easy to find sites that can be exploited. Michael Sutton of SPIdynamics/HP tells you how he came across more than 80 of them in a small sample by writing some quick code using Google’s APIs here.

I wrote a paper several years ago for Breach Security about the subject that is still relevant. You can register and download it here.

How Open is the International Internet?

We usually take it for granted that we can have complete and unrestricted access to the Internet wherever we are these days, but a recent study by an international group of researchers has illustrated exactly how wrong this notion is.

I am not talking about the lack of connectivity, or how hard it is to get a Wifi signal. What I mean is something more insidious: the state-sponsored filtering and blocking of objectionable Internet Web content and other applications by various countries around the world. As the authors involved in the OpenNet Initiative say in their new book, Access Denied: “Claiming control of the Internet has become an essential element in any government strategy to rein in dissent – the twenty-first century parallel to taking over television and radio stations.”

What surprised me the most wasn’t that filtering exists, but how many places do it. Certainly, government-sponsored filtering isn’t new – many public libraries and schools have done it for years here in the US, and hate speech is filtered in several European countries. But what is new is how much is filtered, and how sometimes it is disguised: some countries return a facsimile of an IE error page instead of showing that a site has been deliberately blocked.  Others tamper with their domain name servers to introduce errors when searching for particular sites.

The group collected data during 2006 the hard way – by actually sending in researchers and trying to view various Web pages and run specific applications by connecting to various Internet providers in each country. Some places were too risky, such as Cuba and North Korea. Other places were too big to get a handle on such as Russia. They found filtering in 26 out of 40 nations they visited.

The two biggest blockers (in terms of the number and type of sites) are Iran and China, no surprises there. Both countries block by keywords in the URL stream. China blocks ranges of specific IP addresses, too, and in fact has the most extensive filtering system that implements blocks at various network levels and across the widest range of topics.

Most of the book’s results are available online, and the group did a great job of defining the extent of Web filtering by various kinds of metrics, such as politics and power, social norms and morals, and national security concerns. Different countries filter for different reasons, too. For example, Syria filters a lot of political sites but fewer in other areas, while the Emirates and Saudi Arabia filter out a lot of what they consider objectionable social content. “Filtering directed at political opposition to the ruling government is a common type of blocking that spans many countries and is characteristic of authoritarian and repressive regimes,” say the authors.

There are some big gaps in the research: for example, at some point during 2006 you couldn’t connect via Skype in the Emirates, Jordan, and  Myanmar. Syria and Vietnam also blocked other VOIP providers. Other countries block free-email providers, and some such as Syria, Ethiopia, the Emirates, India and Pakistan also block free blogging providers such as blogspot. It would be nice to update this information with more recent conditions as well as to include other Internet communications tools in future surveys, such as WordPress and Typepad. You can add these suggestions online.

Another aspect of the filtering debate is that it is very ephemeral: not all filters are active all the time, and some countries only put up blocks during elections or other critical time periods when they want to exert more control over the free flow of information. This makes it difficult to present real-time results that have any accuracy, too.

And lest you think that filtering is more apropos to Asian and African nations, here in North America we have had some moments too. In July 2005, the Canadian provider Telus blocked access to the Web site run by the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute, to say nothing of our own government’s Internet surveillance activities,

So what are some lessons for those of us that travel internationally to these countries? First, use a VPN to connect back to your American provider to try to avoid the blocks. If your company doesn’t have one, there are dozens of free and low-cost VPN providers that can help. Second, be careful about the keywords and URLs that you use when you are browsing the Web from abroad. Finally, if you use a free blogging, Web, or email service, expect that you might not have access to these services when you travel.

As the authors say, “The Internet has borders – just like meatspace – and the quality of its borders depends on the situation of the country that erects them.”

The state of the WiMax universe

I’ve know Paul Kapustka for many years, back when we both worked at CMP the first time around for both of us. Paul is starting a new venture called www.sidecutreports.com and his first report is out. He charges $150 for subscriptions, but given the depth of his analysis and insights, it is well worth the fee if you care about broadband wireless and some of the other topics that he has cued up. Did you know that you can get WiMax in about a dozen different cities around the US (sadly, not St. Louis), including of all places Pahrump, Nevada? Did you know where Sprint stands on its WiMax efforts?  How about what the major players are doing in terms of interoperability? All this and more, as they say.

The report is 23 pages and filled with lots of great info. Unlike some other analyst reports from F_____ and G_______ and others, this is completely free of vendor sponsorship — it is pure Paul.

Easy to swallow tablets (PC)

Not just for doctors and cops anymore, the new breed of tablet PCs could be the cure for your company’s mobile computing headaches.
From hospital wards to police cruisers, tablet PCs have become a common sight among specialized users without offices and those who need to compute while standing. But as applications and support for tablets improve, even more sedentary office workers could benefit from these devices.

What has changed in the maturing tablet landscape that should have IT managers thinking about tablets? You’ll have to read my story in Baseline magazine today.