Category Archives: Opinion

Thoughts on computers and the IT industry.

Opinion

Update: Belkin Wi-Fi Phone

I just realised that the story of my Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype lacks any form of closure. But before we get there, let’s start with a quick recap in case you didn’t read the original review or its follow-up.

Last year, after realising that we had spent over ?30 in a quarter on line rental but less than 50p on phone calls, we decided to get rid of our land-line and rely only on broadband and VoIP technology. After some thought we went for Skype and a physical handset that connected to our wireless access point. This seemed like a great solution as leaving a computer switched on 24/7 just so we could recieve calls on our SkypeIn number didn’t appeal.

The appeal quickly wore off when it materialised that the Belkin handset just didn’t work very well. Other parties complained of an annoying echo while we complained that it drifted on- and off-line, meaning that people had to be lucky and call us when it was online. It also exhibited stability problems, often crashing during a call or even while in standby. Belkin were actually pretty efficient about taking the handset back and replacing it with a less broken one.

    We were initially quite happy with the new phone. It actually worked free of the power cable and people were able to call us on our SkypeIn number on a couple of occasions.

    Unfortunately, the more we used it the more we noticed its flaws. For a wireless device, one of its biggest problems is the fact that you pretty much have to leave it plugged in all the time if you want to reach the end of your call without the battery dying. It was fine to unplug it when the call came in but the battery life in stand-by mode meant that even leaving it unplugged in the office for half a day would have been asking for trouble if someone rang.

    Then there were the random hangs. Sometimes, as noted in my follow-up post, the time just stuck, the machine unresponsive. Actually, I tell a lie. If you pushed a button the back-light would come on, giving the impression that it was still alive, but it wouldn’t actually do anything, like make or receive a call.

    Of greater concern were those hangs half way through a call. Typically it would happen after ringing a phone banking service and being kept on hold for an inordinate amount of time. It’s amazing that the phone is still intact after letting us down so badly. Actually, after a several such hangs during what was supposed to be a single transaction it’s amazing that all furniture, glasses and windows are still in one piece.

    Now that I mention phone banking, there was another point where the phone would let you down. At the beginning of each call I was expected to enter my card number and PIN. Fine, but their systems never seemed to recognise the Belkin. Now maybe this is a localisation issue (we have to call both UK and US banks) and not something I can squarely place with the phone, but it was nevertheless a frustration.

    In the end we dare not use the phone to make important calls, fearing that it would cut out at some critical juncture. Equally, we weren’t keen on using it to call family as they, understandably, were irritated when we had to call back three times just to complete a conversation. In the end it was a nice ideal that just didn’t work in practice for what we wanted it for, so a couple of months ago I put it on eBay.

    Now we have our SkypeIn number forwarding to our mobiles, meaning that, like international roaming, we have a pay to receive calls. With the number of landline calls we get this is not a huge problem, but it’s sad that it currently seems to be the only viable method of using Skype without having a computer switched on 24/7.

    Opinion

    The Bourne Confusion

    Have you seen The ‘The Bourne Ultimatum‘ yet? What do you think when you see the title? Tragically my mind immediately jumps to the Bourne Shell, the default command shell on most Unix variants since the late seventies ((A quick aside for the less technical readers. A “shell” is the kind of the file manager you use to interact with your computer. The Macintosh has the Finder; Windows has the Explorer; the Linux has the “Bourne Again Shell,” bad pun and derivation and enhancement of the original Bourne version.)).

    Of course this isn’t the first time that this has happened. When I saw the title ‘The Bourne Supremacy‘ I though, “Yeah, why would anyone use the C Shell?!” Clearly Bourne and its work-a-likes are supreme for scripting even if the original Joy-authored C Shell was better for interactive tasks.

    Similarly, in the first movie the focus seemed to be on this guy Jason Bourne. I was thinking, “No, you’re thinking of Stephen Bourne.” And it’s AT&T Bell Labs, not the CIA.

    I really shouldn’t let this kind of thing get in the way of a good film, but it’s not like us Unix guys really get much of a choice. So I’m going to end this piece with a plea: don’t end up like me. Don’t let your choice of computing platform get in the way of your movie viewing.

    Opinion

    Why I hate Dummies Guides

    It’s not all the books that purport to tell you all you need to know about Microsoft Excel or the Missing Manual for the iPod, although I do question the utility of a thousand page tome about an MP3 player. No, the thing that annoys me are those friendly looking yellow and black books that are marketed at Dummies.

    Why would I object to a series of books that tries to make a complex subject clear and approachable?

    My opposition is not the content. The books that I have seen tend to have a better word-to-picture ratio than many of the competition. Many publishers seem to think that printing a number of large, colour screenshots is a good substitute for incisive and entertaining writing. Sorry, it just isn’t.

    Neither is my objection with the level they are aimed at. I have no problem with someone not knowing much about any given subject — we’re all in that boat from time to time. I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever bought a book on how to use a specific application, but that’s not to say that I can’t see any need for such a category.

    And, it’s not even the quality of the information contained in them. I would have to concede that some of the Dummies Guides are not half bad. I got my dad a book on Microsoft Word and it seemed to be aimed at just about the right level. It included plenty of hint and tips, just the kind of thing that might trip up the unwary.

    It’s not even the cutsey presentation. I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the array of icons that draw out important details, but, frankly, it needs doing somehow and the style is obviously attractive to many.

    So what is it?

    It’s the title. To me, the word “dummy” and the kind of person that it appeals to suggests a particular attitude of the reader. It says that not only does the reader not know the subject, but is actually proud of the fact. I just hate the idea that people are satisfied that they don’t know something. Why be proud of ignorance?

    Opinion

    Apple Addict

    Apple Store 500Like the true Mac obsessive that I am, I was “tuning in” for all the news on todays press event.

    Judging by the effect that the coverage is having on the UK store (see screen shot) it seems that I’m not the only one!

    First impressions: I like the new iMac. I’m not likely to buy one (since a laptop is powerful enough for all my needs), but the glass/aluminium shell looks great, the new CPUs are fast and the price-points (in the US at least) look reasonable. Not so sure about the keyboard, but I guess it’s just a less mobile version of my MacBooks.

    The changes to iWork seem fine. It’s shaping up nicely, but it’s still no Microsoft Office. You still get documents from clients that won’t open in anything else. Shame. And .Mac. Well, it was the price and reliability that made me switch and nothing has changed there.

    On the “more likely to buy” list is the new iLife. The organise feature looks a bit like stacks in Aperture, which is neat. The other components I don’t use anywhere near so much.

    Overall, it looks like a great way to bring the focus away from the iPhone — which you can’t even get in the UK yet — and back to the Mac.

    Opinion

    Smart and Gets Things Done

    I like Joel. Well, I’ve never actually met him, of course. I mean I like his writing. I’ve read much of his website, I subscribe to his RSS feed so that I can see his new pieces as soon as they’re “published” and I’ve bought his other books even though they’re just rehashes of stuff that’s already on the net. That may seem a little crazy, as though I have more money than sense, but some things are much easier to read on paper than on LCD. And his writing is easy, humorous and engaging, making it worth dipping into occasionally.

    So, cutting a long story short, I bought “Smart and Gets Things Done.” So what’s it all about? Well, one suspect is that it’s an advertisement for Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek. But, in fact, it’s a book about attracting, recruiting and keeping super-star programmers. Indeed, chapter one is why you even want to hire top developers when you can hire a decent developer for rather less money and effort.

    He covers the whole process, right from where to find your next recruit; how to sifting through the large number of CVs (resumes) that you’ll probably receive; how to interview people; and how to keep them once they do join. It covers a lot of ground in a couple of hundred pages and he almost makes it sound easy.

    Joel is very much against the Google and Microsoft approach to interviewing. He (rightly I think) points out that asking brainteaser questions only finds out whether people can do… brainteaser questions and tells you little about whether they are decent software people or whether, as the title of the book suggests, are smart and gets things done. He spends some time discussing the title, and this is something that jells with my experience. For example, you don’t necessarily want PhD’s, as they are often smart but spend a lot of time thinking about theoretical problems rather than doing anything about it — clearly not the kind of person you want when deadlines are looming. In another chapter he notes that you really don’t want to be forming opinions of people before you meet them. Or, put another way, suggesting that PhD’s might not “get things done,” is not a brilliant idea.

    In summary there’s plenty of good stuff to see. But, as I mentioned earlier, much of the content has come straight from his website. That was also the case for his previous book, “Joel on Software,” and isn’t necessarily a criticism in and of itself. However, that previous book was intended as a collection of short, separate essays tied together by a common, fairly broad theme — software engineering. In the sense that each chapter was distinct you could reasonably dip into it, reading one section but randomly skipping over another.

    This book, on the other hand, is supposed to be on recruitment — a much narrower subject — and the chapters follow a kind of trajectory. Unfortunately the essays on the website generally work as stand-alone pieces, so when you bunch them all together in a single book and read them back-to-back you find that there is quite a lot of repetition. If it was all a thousand pages long and a recap was in order then that might make sense, but “Smart and Gets things Done” is only a couple of hundred pages long.

    So overall it’s a nice book. It has a lot of good advice, even if some of the suggestions are not achievable by the typical employee. As is generally the case with Spolsky it is entertainingly written and is engaging, witty even. However, given the length of it and the fact that there is a considerable amount of overlap you may be better served by reading it all on his website.

    Opinion

    Is MySpace really the future of email?

    Am I getting old? Perhaps. I’ve been using email since 1992 when I first went to university so I just find it second nature now. It’s got to the point where I organise my whole life using it and I get quite frustrated when I actually have to call someone to get something done that could more easily be done asynchronously ((That’s to say, when I send an email you don’t have to be there to answer it. Unlike a phone call or an instant message where you do.)). But that’s not how many people think according to ZDNet.co.uk.

    The gist is that many people are now using websites such as Facebook and MySpace instead of email. In fact, they claim, teenagers only use email to talk to adults.

    Is this the way of the future? Is it only old-age and inertia that’s stopping people like me from using MySpace exclusively?

    I don’t think so. It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I do use instant messenger and I use my mobile phone more for text messaging than for voice calls, but there are a few issues that we need to work through first.

    The first and most obvious is that of convenience. With email I can use one program (or check one website) to see all the messages that I am interested in reading. With FaceBook I have to check there, and then again on MySpace for my messages there and, finally, still my email just in case someone has mailed me directly or I have a notification from sites that don’t have internal messaging. That’s just a pain! History tells us that these closed systems do not last. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples.

    Let’s look at email and how it evolved. In fact, it seems to have evolved in the same direction twice, first as technology allowed and second due to commercial “lock-in.” It started out as a way to communicate between users on a single machine. This doesn’t make much sense if you’re thinking about personal computers, but in the sixties and early seventies the concept of having your own machine just wasn’t a reality. As machines started to be linked together, so did the email systems. This wasn’t always easy as the different operating systems often had their own “standards” and some, such as Unix, often came with several incompatible implementations. After local networks were installed, people starting thinking globally and started plugging their networks together, creating the Internet ((Okay, so I edited out a few details. I’m trying to show the general trajectory rather than every last twist in the story.)).

    Many of the PC vendors that had not been involved in earlier eras and the bulletin boards that catered for them ((I’m including systems like AOL and Compuserve here.)) went straight for the second tier, a proprietary system barely capable of talking to the outside world.? There were a variety of reasons for this. It was by design — not wanting people to exchange messages without buying their software — or laziness but either way the result was the same. To a certain extent that’s where we are still in the Microsoft world. Exchange will talk to the rest of the SMTP world, albeit reluctantly and, even then, it’s not one hundred percent standards compliant ((Ever wondered what the winmail.dat files are when you open a message in an application other than Outlook?)). Meanwhile, the rest of the world, even companies famous for shunning technologies Not Invented There, are using industry standards to communicate.

    And if we then step forward to the last decade and the progress of instant messenger software we see the same thing in the process of happening. We start with completely separate islands, where I can talk to other people on, say, AIM but friends on MSN are off limits. I either have to push my “buddies” onto the same network or use applications like Adium so I can connect to multiple networks from the same software. And then a couple of years ago we saw the first signs of interoperability, with a pact between Yahoo and Microsoft. And, increasingly, we see the uptake of open standards like Jabber which is used as the foundation for Google Talk.

    So, in the case of both IM and email we started with competing, incompatible technologies that eventually merged into one unified, interoperable version. Is that going to happen with FaceBook and MySpace? I’m not so sure. After all, we already have “messaging” applications outside these social networking sites. I see both as more of a layer on top of traditional email services, acting as an intermediary when communication is first initiated.

    I’m not anti-social networking (I am a member on LinkedIn) but I am keen than we don’t take a step back into the “dark days” of the Internet when we had AOL and MSN competing to keep their users separate from the outside world. Walled gardens are not what the Internet is all about; this kind of system only benefits the companies that own the various properties. Let MySpace do the social bit, introducing people, but let the experts, the proven IM and email systems, keep the communication going.