Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Headlines over the weekend were about Tony Blair’s calls for UN reform.  Here in Ottawa, I read the Citizen and an editorial by Blair in the Globe and Mail. He is calling for:

1. A reformed security council.  It makes no sense that five victors of World War II hold permanent seats.
2. The UN to have the capability to intervene militarily.  Putting aside Iraq, he argues that the UN should have forces at it’s disposal to go to places like Darfur.
3. Increased power for the General Secretary over spending and management.

In addition, he argues that:

1. The World Bank and the IMF need to be reformed, or perhaps merged.
2. The world needs a multilateral institution for the safe enrichment of uranium for energy purposes.  He makes the very sensible observation that every nuclear nation doesn’t need its own enrichment facility.
3. The G8+5 meets regularly, and should be the norm.
4. The UN Environment Program needs to match the importance that the environment now has on the international agenda.

Blair also calls for the world to support the goal of democracy in Iraq.  He asks countries to put aside the past, and come together to help build democratic institutions in Iraq. He couches all of this in the language of interdependence, and multi-lateralism. 

Is this a departure from three years ago when he said that human rights trumps sovereignty, and that he and Mr. Bush would go to Iraq alone?  Or is it just a re-spin of the same message? 

His statements about the legitimacy of the UN have many truthful elements. The lofty goals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not being met in today’s institutions, and the UN itself is mired in bureacracy and frequently unable to address the issues of the day.  His calls for reform should be heard, and considered.

In the end, though, it really boils down to this: Does Britain’s war-monger, and George Bush’s poodle, himself, have the legitimacy to effect the reforms he advocates?

So says Oracle Security chief Ann Davidson.  Speaking at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, she derides the software industry for a culture of “patch, patch, patch”, and takes on the hacker industry over the questionable tactic of holding vendors hostage when vulnerabilities have been found.

It’s a good message, but she should skip trotting out the tired old shibboleths about planes and bridges.  After all, as anyone in the aircraft industry will tell you, you can’t fly a modern plane without software.  It’s just built to a different standard, such as not designed to be updated by end users, for instance. 

Or, perhaps Ann should give up flying altogether.

I’ve spent most of the afternoon installing Asterisk at Home 2.8.  Why?  Because I’ve never installed Asterisk before, I wanted to know what the experience would be like, and I have been inspired for some months by Ward Mundy’s Nerd Vittles blog.  Ward has dozens of neat projects that you can build with Asterisk, and it just looks fun!

I bought the cheapest PC I could find for this project.  Staples is selling off a 3 Ghz Compaq unit with 512M of memory and a 100G drive for under $400.  I also went cheap on the FXO / FXS interfaces — I found a $15 FXO in Hong Kong from a company called X100P. They came with no documentation. I bought the analog interfaces despite the fact that they’re not required for straight IP telephony, because I want to try interfacing this into my home phones.

Ward has a great tutorial on setting up AAH.  It’s based on AAH 2.7, and he strongly recommends that you don’t configure 2.8 as a newbie.  I threw caution to the wind.

Installation is pretty simple.  Download the ISO image, burn it, stick it in the PC, and reboot. Answer a couple of questions, and an hour or so later, you have a PC with Asterisk up and running.  No futzing around with different packages, and other stuff.  It’s all there for you.

And this is where the fun starts.

The first thing, once you’ve installed, is to go and get the latest CentOS updates.  There were 32 updated packages.  Then, because there were kernel changes, I had to rebuild the Zaptel drivers (Zaptel boards are the analog boards built and sold by Digium.  The cheap one I bought was a clone of a Digium FXO board).  I also had to download a patch to spinlock.h, because the standard one breaks the Zaptel build.

When that was done I ran into the first substantial hurdle.  CentOS couldn’t see my FXO card. I read and read a couple of enormous threads on this, but to no avail.  Eventually, I opened the PC, and pulled out the modem that shipped with it, wondering if there might be some kind of conflict between it and the FXO card.  On reboot, there was  my FXO!  Phew.

Next job was to configure some extensions.  A couple of softphones, and the x100PC.com s100 FXS.  The s100 was tricky.  I figured out with some reading, and visiting VoIP-INFO.ORG that it comes configured with a static IP address on a different subnet from the one I use at home.  Luckily, there was a s100 manual on VoIP Info, otherwise I would have been lost.  The s100’s english language directions are not super clear, and some of the defaults it uses are unintuitive.   Still, it speaks IAX, which makes it a good choice for Asterisk.

I also configured a Virbiage Cubix softphone, the only softphone I’ve seen yet that can speak IAX.  It’s simple and seems fairly robust.

At this point, I was able to pass calls back and forth between devices on my network, but not yet call out.

My strategy for configuring the call out is to first configure it with a SIP provider, and then configure the FXO card.  My thinking is that if it takes a while, I will be forever disconnecting the family phone from the network, which is not a good thing.   Without too much difficulty, I was able to get my SIPPhone account configured, and now have Asterisk registering.  And, in fact, I can send dialing digits to SIPPhone, but I cannot yet dial out. Every time, it comes back and tells me the user I am trying to reach is unknown.  I suspect I have simply made an error in the dialing plan.  More reading is required.

Dinner, at this point, beckoned.  By the end of the week, though, when I have some spare time, I expect to have this all configured and up and running.

If you’re a Rogers Wireless subscriber, you may have noticed that there is an email to text message bridge available to you.  Anyone can send email to your number@pcs.rogers.com, and Rogers will deliver that to you as a text message.  In fact, that’s the way that AOL and MSN offline  IM text messaging works.  It simply gets sent to the email gateway and dropped onto your telephone as an SMS message.  Sounds pretty useful, right?

Not so fast Jim Bob… here’s where we plumb the depths of stupid marketing ideas.  No doubt some fresh and minty straight-out-of-biz school MBA cooked this little scheme up without ever once talking to a customer about what real world users might think of the idea.  It’s that moronic.

You see, Rogers allows you a certain number of “free” SMS messages each month on whatever plan you buy, and then bills you for the overage at $.15 per message.  However, because they’d like to encourage the use of SMS, and would like to send you SMS offers, they don’t bill for incoming SMS messages, just the ones you send. 

So here’s their brain-dead idea to jack up the number of SMS messages you send.  Their email to text gateway doesn’t deliver you the actual message you received.  Instead, it delivers you a message saying that you’ve got a message waiting.  If you’d like to read your message, it goes on, then REPLY to this message with the word READ. PRESTO: when you reply, you consume one text message.  Use the service often enough, and your “free” text messages included in your plan will be exhausted and Rogers will be in the money. 

Even worse, the email to text message gateway is one way only.  You can’t actually reply to the sender of that message you just received!  Effectively, this means that the AOL and MSN offline text messaging options are basically useless.  In fact, the whole email to text messaging gateway is useless.  Rogers has built a metered communications system (can’t cure those old-line telco’s of all their bad habits overnight, it seems), and then put up a giant roadblock to prevent people from actually using it.  I’m sure there’s a junior product manager somewhere deep within the bowels of Rogers marketing department right now wondering why this “product” doesn’t make the company any money.

But, you know, there is a way out of this SMS hell… it’s called the Rogers Email to Text Direct Delivery Option. For the paltry sum of $5 per month, Rogers will make email to SMS work the way any normal thinking person would expect it to work. They’ll turn off that goofy READ feature, and just send the message directly to your phone.  And you can reply to the message too…

I’ll bet that same junior product manager is wondering why this feature doesn’t make any money either…  well, here are two clues: 

1. Finding the page on the Rogers site where this is described is a bit like cave diving without a light.  It’s not easy. 
2. Once you’ve found the page and know what you want, there doesn’t seem to be a way anywhere on the Rogers site to actually order this product.  That’s right.  You can’t order it.

Most importantly, nickling and diming customers with meaningless and/or stupid choices is a proven way to make them look for simpler solutions elsewhere.  One of the reasons that VoIP services have had success versus incumbents is that they understand this fundamental piece of psychology.  Instead of charging a buck or two for every meaningless “service”, they offer a bundle packed with features at one price.

Bell Mobility doesn’t go out of their way to make their SMS gateway hard to use, by the way, and I bet they have more SMS traffic as a result. 

Every so often, the compatibility pigeons come home to roost, and you just have to grin and bear it. Last night was one of those evenings. 

Exhibit A: My faithful Toshiba Tecra A1 laptop.  I’ve had this PC since the spring of 2004, so, while it’s getting old, it’s not dead yet.  Some time back I decided to scrub it, and reinstall everything fresh.  That’s where the trouble started. I had assumed, incorrectly, that I could just grab a Windows disk (got a bunch of them around the house), load it up, type in the key on the certificate of authenticity with the OEM PC and… bob’s your uncle, it should just work.  Boy… was I wrong.  

The first thing that happened was that the standard XP install wouldn’t accept the key that was on the PC.  I phoned Microsoft, and then three different numbers at Toshiba, and eventually learned that I had an OEM key, and this would require the Toshiba OEM version of the operating system disks. ”Oh”, said I, “could you just send me one?” ”I can sir”, said the polite young lady (PYL) on the other end of the phone, ”how would you like to pay for that?” 

Now, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute here!  Pay?  I’ve already paid for the OS, when I bought the darn PC!  Well, it transpires that Toshiba will send me a “recovery” disk, and cost for that is $65.  $65 for a 50 cent piece of plastic, plus whatever Toshiba charges for “handling”.

At this point, I am beginning to feel extreeeeeeemely taken advantage of.   The PYL on the other end of the line explains that I should have a recovery disk already, and that this is merely the replacement cost if I have lost it.  I explain to the PYL that I never received a disk, and I feel extreeeeeeeemely upset to have to pay for something I’ve already paid for.  The PYL and I talk for a while, and eventually she promises to call me back after talking to her supervisors.  Suprise surprise, she never does call back. I go ahead and cheat the system by putting in one of my Windows license keys on the standard OS and it installs.  It’s at that point, though, that the compatibility turds hit the fan.  The standard Windows XP install doesn’t have drivers on it for the Tecra’s graphics card, sound system, or network system.  Essentially, my laptop has become a brick unless I pay Toshiba $65.   I telephone in several more times, each time speaking to a different PYL and hoping to get a CD from them, and each time getting the same answer. 

Toshiba, you suck.  You didn’t have to make it so hard to reload the OS.  It would have cost pennies to drop the disk I needed into the box when I bought the laptop, and at most a buck or two to send the disk when I wanted it.  Microsoft, you suck for not making the drivers I needed available on Windows update. 

Exhibit B: Windows Vista.  Eventually, I decided “what the hay, I’ll try Windows Vista” on this laptop.  I know, it’s a little radical, but I do it anyway.  I download the image from the MSDN, back up my hardrive, format, and install.  Wouldn’t you know it?  Vista has the drivers I need. Yeah, it’s slow, and some of the software I rely on (like the iotum Icetray) doesn’t work, but at least I’m up and running. 

Hmm…..

Fast forward to today.  I am about to install Vista Beta 2. I had to remember that Microsoft broke the file tree by moving Music and Pictures out of documents, which breaks another Microsoft product I rely on (Foldershare) but it was generally a pretty smooth install… except that it had to be done clean, because the Vista installer for Beta 2 crashes when run under the CTP… but I digress.  While I’m at it, I download Office 2007 beta and install that as well. 

So far, so good.  Install Skype 2.5… Sweet! Install Foldershare… restore my files… this rocks!  Install Gizmo Project… BOOM.  It’s beta… what can you expect?  In general, Beta Software sucks, but Microsoft, you didn’t have to break my applications by doing dumb things like moving directory names around.

Exhibit C: Skype.  Everybody rags on Skype for using a proprietary protocol to move their traffic around.  That’s a compatibility nightmare.  So, imagine how compelling something like GnomeLink (basically the NCH SwiftSound Skype to SIP Uplink) is.  Install on your PC, and presto, Skype calls get routed to your home phone via PhoneGnome.  I didn’t know how it worked, but I learned last night. 

I was working on a presentation on the big Athlon I’ve got in my home office.  This fella gets overloaded.  It’s my office PC, a music server for a couple of UPnP music boxes I’ve got, and a family PC used by a lot of people. About 9 PM Andy Abramson Skypes me.  It rings on my telephone, thanks to GnomeLink, and I am now talking to Andy, gratis.  He called me free on Skype, and I answered it free, on my phone line.  And it’s all free because of Skype’s zero cost North American calling promotion. ’cept, there’s a brutal echo. Andy says “let’s switch to Gizmo, I’ve noticed it doesn’t echo as much”.  Sure says I. I’ve got virtually every soft client known to man installed on this thing.  That’s when the gates of compatibility hell are opened, and I enter purgatory.

You see, the Skype uplink program has grabbed my USB sound drivers.  That’s how it does its magic.  Since Skype has a proprietary protocol, it gets around that by pretending to be a sound device, having Skype play sounds on that imaginary device, and then rerouting the packets via SIP to PhoneGnome.  It’s a very clever hack.  But it also breaks every other USB headset on the system, even when it’s turned off.  Essentially, Gizmo is no good to me unless I dig out one of my legacy headsets and plug it into the soundcard.  Moreover, I can’t just turn this hack off.  The driver is still held by the NCH program.  I can’t kill it, I can’t reboot… it’s a Zombie, and it won’t stop chasing me!

Skype, you suck! Forcing hacks like the NCH Uplink programming on us because you refuse to be compatible with standards puts you in the same league as the trust barons of the 19th century. 

Compatibility is the bane of every PC users existance whether it’s a result of stupid business decisions, or dumb engineering decisions.  Using a PC doesn’t have to be, nor should it have to be, this difficult.

At this rate, I may just go buy a Mac.