Printer problems

About two metres from my desk at work, is one of those new multi-function polisprinter things. It’s been churning away all week, page upon page upon page. Most of the time the noise isn’t unbearable, but sometimes it does get difficult to concentrate. Whiz, whirr, ka-chunk, all week.

So yesterday morning, for the first time this week, I needed to print something – two measly pages. Do you think it would do it for me? Hell no! Some kinda of network printer server outage.

And what’s particularly annoying is Word didn’t just come back and say “hey, I can’t do it”. No, it sat there for about two minutes with the print dialogue hung, Word disabled, while it worked out that it couldn’t do it. Somewhere, there’s a timeout setting that’s set way too high. I reckon if it’s not working in 30 seconds, it’s not working period. I’ll go rummaging around in the settings.

Will corporate blogging go worldwide?

An article from The Economist on Robert Scoble, and the whole corporate blogging thing, and also revealing why Microsoft’s developer TV “channel” is called Channel 9. (And here’s Scoble on the tree in the picture in the Economist article.)

Corporate blogging has certainly taken off in the States. But will it be worldwide like personal blogging? Will it move out of the IT industry into other sectors? Does the rest of the world enjoy evangelising for their companies like the Americans do? Do companies in the rest of the world have that kind of online community that American IT companies do?

Indeed, since the IT industry is largely driven by American innovation, are there companies elsewhere that have the kind of geek following needed to bring corporate blogs up to the kind of readership where senior management consider them worthwhile?

Scoble is unrepentant, considering it inexusable for a corporate web site not to be doing this and making it clear it’s not technology for technology’s sake: it’s marketing, and feeding your web site with visitors.

Despite the global village, in some respects those of us in AU remain a little way behind the pack. Mick at G’day World talked on one of their recent podcasts about trying to set up a corporate blogging conference, and it seems to have died for now for lack of sponsors.

I recall that I saw URLs on US TV ads in early 1996. It must have been another year before they popped up in Australian TV ads. Maybe there’ll be a similar delay until corporate blogging takes a foothold here and worldwide.

Default passwords, iPod mini and mobile games

Common default passwords, most-used passwords, lists of trojans, all good stuff for the network admin or hacker. (via Office Weblog)

Hot rumour department: iPod mini to get a colour screen and a bigger drive, probably 5 or 6Gb, with a probable announcement next week.

This mob is selling well-known games adapted for mobile phone use. They vary from clone games like Packman to the apparently fully licensed stuff like Shrek 2. My kids are addicted to Midtown Madness 3 on the XBox… would they go for it in 2-D on my phone? Dunno, but at AUD$8, it’s not too exhorbitant. Might give it a try, when they get bored of Bounce Back.

Wikipedia down, and MyDoom hits again

Wikipedia down: We’re currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on several servers and running recovery. Back soon. … Let’s hope they’re back soon, and that that rumoured deal with Google goes through. Despite rumblings of lack of accuracy, Wikipedia is still a terrific resource.

Another MyDoom variant (rumoured to be Mydoom.o@MM) is playing havoc with mail servers and networks, particularly in big corporations. This one puts SCR, EXE and COM files in Zips, and sends them around. From the sounds if it, there’s still enough gullible people who blindly open attachments that it’s spreading fast through corporate networks. Time to remind all your non-geek friends to take care around attachments. Happily for me, most of my family are running Macs!

Skype: good or bad?

Skype now has a momentum that makes it hard to ignore — almost anybody on broadband who is interested in dodging long distance call fees is now happily chatting away. And though it doesn’t always “just work”, it’s certainly good enough and easy enough that it has mainstream appeal, unlike most previous VOIP applications, at least the freebie ones.

But its proprietary nature has got some commenters hot under the collar. In this month’s Australian Personal Computer, Dan Warne takes a swipe at Skype (heh), and suggests we shouldn’t use it (not online alas). Ted Wallingford has a similar beef.

Personally, I’m just following the pack. I don’t have the time to look around for a good open source, standards-based alternative, and even so, would it have the critical mass of users that Skype has? A number of overseas friends are now on Skype, so I’m happy to have the client running, alongside Trillian — which is for my many ICQ contacts. Yes, ICQ. I also haven’t been convinced to switch to Jabber, the open source IM client… why would I? Only one person I know uses it.

It’d be great if Skype had embraced existing standards. They say SIP and other protocols weren’t good enough for them, and they had to go down their own road. But if likewise it would be a gesture of goodwill to open up the protocol, and get it ratified as a standard. Maybe when they’ve made their first billion.

The other night I had a surprise Skype call from a friend in Poland I haven’t talked to for about five years. It may have its problems sometimes, but by and large it does just work. And for me as a consumer, I’m afraid that’s more convincing than some open source, standards ideal.

WordPress 1.5

WordPress 1.5 came out overnight. Well actually it came out on Valentine’s Day, but they didn’t announce it until a few hours ago. From the sounds of it, there’s been a lot of work done on the template system, comment control, a way to make non-dated pages run in the system (ooh, getting more CMS-ey). All sounds rather good to me, and I’ll be checking it out and (all being well) implementing it on the blogs I run directly.

SMS spam from sms.ac

I got an invitation to join sms.ac. A quick Google seemed to indicate it’s not a great idea unless you want to give your mobile number to people who will SMS-spam you.

Further, if they convince you to reveal your Hotmail password (on the pretext of letting you read it from your mobile) they’ll also spam the people in your address book, inviting them to join. Delightful. And the person who “invited” me? She wasn’t even aware it had happened.

So remember kids: sms.ac is bad. Now email this warning to all your friends.

Programming quote

This is possibly my favourite programming quote of all time:

“You know, when you have a program that does something really cool, and you wrote it from scratch, and it took a significant part of your life, you grow fond of it. When it’s finished, it feels like some kind of amorphous sculpture that you’ve created. It has an abstract shape in your head that’s completely independent of its actual purpose. Elegant, simple, beautiful.

“Then, only a year later, after making dozens of pragmatic alterations to suit the people who use it, not only has your Venus-de-Milo lost both arms, she also has a giraffe’s head sticking out of her chest and a cherubic penis that squirts colored water into a plastic bucket. The romance has become so painful that each day you struggle with an overwhelming urge to smash the fucking thing to pieces with a hammer.”

— Nick Foster (“Life as a programmer”)

(via Owen)

VoIP ain’t gonna happen this month

I’ve just moved houses and thought it would be a grand idea to replace our fixed phone line with a VoIP phone like that supplied by Engin. Save the $30/month fixed line rental, skip the $60 connection fee and also upgrade our net connection to broadband, come out ahead with features and finances. Everything would be great.

What a stupid idea.

The VoIP service offered by Engin is $20/mo, so you are saving $10/mo on connectivity. Our ISP costs $10/mo, so the most we can afford to pay for an ISP and come out equal is $20/mo. But if we pay only that then we are effectively getting broadband for free. The VoIP is $150, but we’ll just ignore that cost. It’s only $90 more than hooking up a fixed line.

Obviously, to use a VoIP phone you need IP connectivity – an ISP. Okay, so we’ll just sign up to one of those $20 / 200meg plans ADSL and that’ll be great; I did some figuring and we’d use nothing like that kind of traffic, even with voice calls consuming 1K/sec (all figuring based on Engin’s figures, supplied in the user forum, which has been pulled – methinks because the users were slagging them off). No problem signing up for a couple of years, no worries, I’ll be in the new place for at least that long.

You can’t have ADSL without a fixed line phone.

You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. Cable, I’ll have cable. Call one of the two cable providers, the house has been cabled up by both. Except they’ve merged, to increase competition. No worries, I’ll call the only monopolistic cable provider, hook up (ought to be cheap, the house is already cabled up) and away we go. $279 to connect to your cable service?!?! $40/month to stay connected?!?! You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. I happen to know that although cable and ADSL are widely regarded as your two options for broadband, there’s a third option here in Melbourne – radio. Alphalink provide superfast wireless access for only $33/mo; but connection is $286. But guess what? $33 is greater than $20. So we come out Losers.

So I resigned myself and we got a fixed line. And that’s why VoIP isn’t gonna happen this month, and I suspect won’t be happening for a long time yet.