Omar's Blog

As of today I’m officially off Microsoft Messenger in any of their incarnations. Not because of any technical or inherent philosophical problems, but mostly because I kept getting spammed to death with really stupid IM’s that included a link, to what I can only presume was either a phishing site or an ad site.

Of course I never clicked on the links, and I immediately blocked the spammer accounts, which never seemed to do any good, because it only took like 10 minutes to get another IM from a different account with basically the same text and link. After battling with this for over a month I decided to take a look at my MSN contacts… most are people from work that I already have on our company’s jabber server, most of the other accounts are from people whom I can usually reach more effectively on Facebook or e-mail.

So.. as of today I’m officially leaving the whole Microsoft Messenger platform and am going to focus entirely on Google Talk and Facebook IM. If you need to get in touch of me, you can reach me there.

During the last episode of Latin Tech Talk, I talked extensively about how Microsoft is getting a bad rap from everyone and how I didn’t think it was justified. “I have not had any problems with Microsoft Vista”, I said, “I think it’s a lot better than Windows XP, more stable,  bla bla bla…” Well this morning I got this little pop-up window on my computer. Thank you Microsoft!

The iPhone 3G is an amazing device. It’s definitely a new communications, computing, and gaming platform.. but it sucks battery like no other device I’ve seen! I have a car charger and two wall chargers (one at home) and another that I carry with me in my laptop bag.. and ever since I’ve bought the phone I’ve neede to charge it at least twice a day (I use the iPhone a lot).

This does create somewhat of a problem for me, because I know that the most rechargeable batteries have a finite number of charges before they degrade into uselessness. And I think the amount of charging and discharging that I put my phone through every day must be rapidly destroying it! So, how do I make each charge last more? 

Quite ironically, if you disable the 3G radio (easy to do in phone settings) the phone will automatically revert to EDGE for it’s communications… and this will dramatically extend the time between charges. For an added kick, disable WiFi, and disable Bluetooth as well, and you will get a lot more juice per charge from your phone, and hopefully extend the life from your battery as well.

After doing this, my phone now lasts an entire day of normal (phone) usage with limited e-mail checking and twitter usage (using the EDGE network).. a little slower than 3G, but the not terribly much! And if I ever need to download something important, or do some serious browsing, I’ll enable 3G or WiFi (which is only a visit to the settings page away), do my work, and disable after I’m done. It would be nice if an app came along that let me easily toggle 3G right from the home menu. But for now, I’m not annoyed by having to visit the settings every once in a while. At least I can use my Phone all day without worrying about where I’ll have to charge next.

I’m actually using a word processor to write this post. Not because I want to, even though Open Office Write is an awesome word processor and I would just love to write everything here, but because for the 1^st time God knows how long, our Internet service provider has had a massive outage.

We’ve had such great service from our provider that we decided a few years ago that we’d give them the contract to supply our whole corporate communications package. They handle our phones, our cellphones, and our Internet service. Which, in hindsight, may not have been such a good idea. Then again, this is the 1^st time they’ve had a problem of this magnitude in the 3 years that we’ve been their customers, and the price consideration they gave my company when we gave them the contract for everything is very considerable (sorry for the redundant redundancy… sorry again).

As soon as I walked into the office this morning and turned my laptop on I noticed: no Internet. All local e-mail and services were running, but our gateway was not letting me access the outside world. Funny, it never occurred to me that our ISP may be at fault, I immediately though our firewall was acting up again! I needed to get through my morning e-mail so instead of calling the IT department and asking what the problem was, I decided I’d connect to the Internet on my N95 and create a hot spot with the Joiku software (which deserves a post all of it’s own… I promise I’ll write about it soon). Alas, Internet on the cellphone is not working either.

Funnily enough, as soon as I notice that there’s no Internet on my cellphone I get a call from my wife, and she complains to me that there’s no Internet at the house either (yes, we use the same company that provides Internet access at the office for my Internet connection at home). The the coin finally drops and my head goes CLICK… the ISP has had a massive outage. I called our IT department, and they confirm my fears.

It’s been almost an hour now of no Internet access. Our provider is one of the largest providers in El Salvador, so I’m guessing that the outage will not only affect our company, but a whole bunch of big companies and many home connections as well. I can’t wait to hear what people have to say about this on the local blogs, the newspapers and the media.

Also, lately I’ve been siding with John Dvorak’s point of view that the “cloud” is very unreliable and that putting everything up on the cloud may be a bad idea. These kind of events (massive country-wide ISP outage) just prove his point. The cloud is a very wonderful but brittle and fragile thing. We can do a lot of very cool and interesting things on the Internet, but it’s just not reliable enough to BE the new platform.

Steve Gillmor keeps saying that Office is dead. Today is the 1^st time in a long time that I’m very happy he is wrong. Because if I had all my stuff up on the cloud as he suggests, my whole company would be unproductive this morning. Oh, BTW… we don’t use MS Office, we deployed Open Office company wide almost 5 years ago… But, I can write about that on a later post.

HELP PLEASE! What have I missed? I really don’t want to go back to Windows XP just for World of Warcraft! But that’s one of the MAIN uses for my gaming machine! It’s ironic that WOW runs better on my wife’s iMac now than on my über-powerful gaming rig!

After a very long time of not visiting seesmis, I finally went back and found that somebody had replied to one of my rants about Windows XP drivers versus Ubuntu drivers. So.. I decided to post a small reply… BTW, the driver world (at least in the graphics card areana) is pretty much on par now for both platforms.

Check THIS out!

Amazing.. a digitally altered picture makes it to the front page of a bunch of “respected” newspapers. So, again, whats the difference between Bloggers and journalists? Oh, right, journalists take classes and get payed a lot to make mistakes, while bloggers make the mistakes for free. Or something to that effect.

Ok, so now people in Spain pay a special tax on MP3 players to offset artists’ lost revenue due to piracy. Since they’re paying this tax, is it now legal to download music with p2p tools till your heart’s content? If not, it then seems to me that you’re paying too much for music, and you should oppose the tax. Either make music “free” and charge the tax, or eliminate the tax and let people pay for the music they want to buy.

Taxes are usually the worst solutions to economic problems, because they are very unjust. What happens if I use my MP3 player only for podcasts, and I have receipts for all of my music on my iPod? Can I get a tax refund? Not likely.

How did the Spanish people let themselves get suckered into such a dumb-ass tax?

I have an HD plasma screen in my living room, but the only HD device in my house is my AppleTV. I was not about to buy an HD-disc player until the format war was over (I’m glad it finally is, but I want to wait for the prices to drop before I run out to buy a Blue Ray player).

Granted, the main reason I bought an Apple TV was not for the movies, but rather to watch video podcasts on my living room TV instead of on my iPod or on my computer. And I was blown away by the great HD podcasts out there, all free and all great!

However, when Apple released the ability to rent movies in HD quality right from the device, I immediately wanted to try it out to review it. What I witnessed has blown me away! The video Quality is amazing, the audio quality is fantastic (I have the Apple TV hooked up to my home theater audio’s optical input to get the full 5.1 surround).

However, the true test of the device, the ultimate test, the ‘non plus ultra’ way of determining whether the device, interface, and concept would ultimately work is what I call the wife test. I’m extremely happy to report that my wife has given the device her seal of approval. She likes the convenience of choosing a movie right from the couch, the quality of the film once it has downloaded, and absolutely loves the convenience of not having to return anything to the rental place!

So far we’ve watched two hi def movies and have loved the overall experience. We’ve even rented a few movies that we have not watched yet, but that are on queue for our next TV watching break… which leads me to point out the one thing we do not like about the the system.

One day to watch a rented movie is way too short. Any new parent will tell you that you simply cannot watch a movie in one sitting, once you have kids in the house (unless it’s a children’s movie… in which case renting a movie is a bad way to go as well because kids love to watch the same movie over and over and over and over again until they are able to recite every line in film and drive their parents crazy because not only are parents forced to watch or listen to the movie at home but also out of the house because the children will gladly act the movie out for them constantly, making sure that there is no way in hell mommy and daddy will ever forget the crucial plot elements of the film.)

Sorry for that tangent… had to be said. In any event, watching a full feature film in a house with children is often an “after dark” activity. It is one that must be done after the children are asleep because, lets face it, the world revolves around our little angels and they know it and they require your full attention at all times. No time for movie watching if any of our children are awake. So, we wait for our kids to go to sleep before we sit down to finally enjoy a film.

Now the main problem with this strategy is that by the time our kids are asleep, mommy and daddy are deathly tired. As soon as we sit down to watch a movie (after tucking the kids in, reading bed-time stories, praying, and sometimes staying just a little longer because they just want you to stay there until they fall asleep, then setting up the baby monitors in the living room loud enough that you can hear them, but low enough to not get distracted by the static and radio frequency pollution) we press play on our AppleTV and immediately fall sleep on the couch.

I’m not kidding. Usually we only wake up because the other snores, in which case we wake each other up, readjust our posture, rewind the film to the point we vaguely recollect we were watching, and immediately fall asleep again. This iterates usually to about the midway point of the film, when we actually face the truth and stop the film and go to bed, making another date for the next night to watch the rest of the film.

The problem with the Apple TV model of movie renting is that you only have 24 hours to watch the movie, so now we have the added stress all day to finish watching the movie or pay another $4.99 to download the HD version again. What ends up happening most of the time is that we force ourselves to stay awake and finish the movie in one sitting, which is counter-productive because we end up hating the movie, usually not because there is anything wrong with the film itself but because we simply can’t enjoy it at our pace.

So Apple and Movie Studios please listen to your public: change the terms, give us 3 or, better yet, 5 days to watch the film. I’m sure you will have happier customers and an even better model to compete with NetFlix. Because as it is, we love the product, but as we get older we’ll have to go back the traditional renting model at Blockbuster simply because we have more time to watch the movies we rent.

Here’s a Seesmic video I shot at the office. I kind of hate having to run Windows to try these new sites out. In this particular case it was not the fault of the website (seesmic, very interesting), but rather the fact that Logitech has not done their homework and written official Linux drivers for the their webcams. Also Intel or Second Life, should work on writing kick-ass drivers for Intel integrated 3D cards… it’s shameful that on the same hardware, SL outputs double the framerate when run in Windows than when it’s run on Linux.

I have an Nvidia graphics board at home (with propietary Nvidia Linux drivers) and will try to run the same test there to see if it’s the drivers that give less performance on Linux than they do in Windows.

Powered by ScribeFire.