WombatNation

I’m in London right now, and the exchange rate between the US dollar and the British pound is absolutely brutal. It’s about $1.65 to £1. Hey, typing £ is much easier on an English keyboard. And just for the heck of it, €.

The trip so far, other than the afternoon recurrence of jetlag poison, has been great. Tomorrow we are off to see Chelsea play Aston Villa.

Next week finds us in Munich for Oktoberfest. I need to start drinking more ale in pubs very soon. Preparation is key.

Update: Oktober 1 - Russian Finance magazine depicts my pain. [via b0ing b0ing]

I got to try out Skype tonight on a random call with someone in Vermont. I was definitely impressed with the sound quality of the call. She said that either she or a friend had used Skype to talk to someone in Israel, and the sound quality was pretty good for that call, too.

I was using my Plantronics headset, which worked pretty well. I forgot to ask whether she was using a headset or a speaker and microphones. Obviously, this will not qualify as a rigorous assessment of the Skype P2P Telephony and Chat services.

The Good

• No echo
• Minimal latency (i.e., only a small hint of the “talking to an astronaut” feeling)
• It just worked - no router changes, no firewall changes
• Simple, easy to use UI
• Nice integration between the chat interface and the voice interface

The Bad

• High frequencies were greatly diminished (but the low frequencies were okay, so it wasn’t tinny)
• Not really full duplex; kind of like a good, but not great, quality speakerphone
• Very limited feature set

The limited feature set could arguably be called a good thing, at least for now. I haven’t even bothered to look for online help within the app. Everything I wanted to do was completely obvious. Skype, a.k.a, Skyper Limited, plans to add a lot more features like conferencing and they plan to integrate with the PSTN, SIP servers, and other chat services, like ICQ and AIM. It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off without overcomplicating the interface and the options dialog, which so far is mostly a bunch of checkboxes. The current set of options are also really more like preferences than configuration.

The first call I was received was from Janus Friis. Either this was the Skype co-founder, Janus Friis, or someone else who took his name as a username. I missed him this morning by an hour. Assuming it was really the co-founder, my guess is that he’s randomly calling people during the Skype beta period who have just signed up for Skype. That would be a smart thing, since there aren’t a huge number of people using it just yet. There are about 16,000 users online right now. It would have been cool to get a quick call so I could verify everything was working.

The people behind Kazaa and Joltid have taken their P2P expertise to the telephony world with Skype, a P2P telephony application.

One of the biggest problems with IP telephony for home users is that most endpoint protocols, e.g. H.323 and SIP, require that you open ports in your firewall, assuming the home user is smart enough to be using a firewall. NAT is yet another problem for the traditional approaches. I tried to set up the Pingtel instant expressa SIP based softphone about a year ago to use with TellMe Studio, but gave up after an hour or so of trying because of all the hassles involved in reconfiguring my router. Skype gets around the firewall in the same way P2P programs do; they tunnel over port 80.

Conversations are encrypted via 256-bit AES and the Skype FAQ claims that 3-16 kbytes per second of bandwidth are used during a call. For comparison, the bandwidth for a regular PSTN call is about 8 kbytes per second. A good IP telephony system, however, can compress the signal to about 1 kbyte per second. Encryption via IPSec would double the bandwidth needed, but there are better solutions. Anyway, the bandwidth needed for Skype calls is a little high, relatively speaking. We’ll have to see how that affects their system, especially for people on shared or lower bandwidth connections.

Of course, bandwidth is not really a problem for individuals making an IP phone call over a non-shared broadband connection. The big problem tends to be latency induced by slow networks or bursty network traffic and errors that require digitized voice packets to be resent. Also, the echoes due to the latency have a tendency to make IP calls sometimes sound like you are listening to someone talking through a long, narrow pipe. You need to write some pretty good code to keep the jitter buffer small enough so that a caller doesn’t feel like he is on a phone call with an astronaut somewhere near Mars. With a good quality IP phone switch on a well engineered network, though, an IP call can be indistinguishable from a PSTN call.

I’ve now installed Skype and am looking for someone else to try it out with. I have a pretty good quality headset (Plantronics DSP 500), so I’m hoping the sound quality will be reasonable. Either Skype me at username wombatnation, or send me an email to set up a session. I’m obviously not always sitting at my PC, and even when I am home and using la machina, I usually have it booted into Linux. Unfortunately, Skype is Windows only for now.

If you loved part 1 of my incinerating toilet story, you might not hate part 2. Part 1 provided a “quick overview of the Incinolet brand incinerator toilet and the fine people that bring this advanced technology to a grateful world.” Part 2 follows up with an in depth look at the actual incinerating toilet installed at my cabin. Highlights include what happens when metal objects with low melting points somehow make their way into the toilet.

I’m starting to think that when Philip Morris paid to enter the corporate villian protection program and was renamed Altria, another part of the deal was that the RIAA and SCO agreed to act like World Wrestling Foundation bad guys to draw away the heat. I mean, it’s not like the RIAA and SCO are literally killing their customers, but they aren’t exactly breeding much customer loyalty, either.

The RIAA’s amnesty offer is absolutely laughable. You have to send in a photo ID with the affidavit. How many people are stupid enough to do that?

The only thing you get out of the program is that you won’t be sued by the RIAA for past infringement. But now, you’ve admitted you’ve knowingly downloaded music illegally in the past and you’ve given them an easy way to track you in the future. You get no legal protection for future actions, and you can guarantee they will be trying to track everything you do from here on out. Then, when they later take you into court on trumped up evidence for alleged new copyright infringements, they will parade out the affidavit you signed as evidence of you being a recidivist, just like a heroin user who couldn’t stay away from the smack.

You should participate in the shamnesty program only if:

1. you have done a very large amount of copyright infringing in the past
2. you believe that you infringed only RIAA copyrighted works
3. you honestly believe you will never infringe RIAA copyrighted works again
4. you trust the RIAA (whose website, by the way, gets regularly owned by hackers) with any private info contained on your photo ID
5. you did a very poor job of hiding your identity while using file sharing networks
6. and you think the RIAA is just about to sue you

I’m tempted to send in a couple hundred affidavits with fake photo IDs of Hillary Rosen, but I suspect that they would send the FBI after me, while at the same time counting those affidavits as part of the total number of participants in their soon to be labeled “generous and well-received” amnesty program.

After a long work from home day, which included 5 conference calls spanning most of 8 am to 6:30 pm, I decided to head out for a high speed hill climb on my bicycle. As I was rolling my bike out of the garage at about 6:40 pm, I heard a series of loud thumping noises that seemed to emanate from the living room, which is above the garage. Obviously, my two rambunctious cats (Nicholas at 17 pounds and Alexi at 19 pounds) must have gone racing across the floor and knocked something over, possibly while leaping onto a tall wobbly object that was not designed to bear their weight. This would not be the first time. Or even the tenth. Maybe the twentieth.

A few seconds later, I heard some more rumbling, but it didn’t seem to come from inside the house. I ran quickly upstairs to assess the damage, but they had a look (as best a cat can) of innocence and confusion on their faces. Not seeing any cat-induced damage, off I went.

After I got back, I learned that a magnitude 3.9 earthquake centered in Lake Temescal Regional Park, which is about 2 miles away, was the real cause for the thumping and rumbling. Since then, the cats and I have patched things up, although I still blame them for all the tooth marks in the window blinds.

The Sacramento Bee ran an article this week by Rachel Leibrock on moblogging. She interviewed me by email for the story.

“Moblogging is still in a very early growth stage, mainly due to a general lack of awareness of the power of technology and a lack of access to the necessary tools,” explains Oakland-based software architect Robert Stewart.

Unfortunately, the “this” from “power of this technology” in my emailed answer to a question somehow got cut out on the editing room floor. I think it makes it sound like I believe that people aren’t yet moblogging in large numbers because they are oblivious to technology, in general. Of course, I was referring to just the specific technology surrounding moblogging. Honestly, I don’t think people are generally clueless, just mostly.

Now, the truth can be told. Canned bread is real and it exists on shelves in stores unlikely to be anywhere near you. Nonetheless, you will definitely want to read this in depth review of the canned bread phenomenon. This riveting, critical analysis was brought to you, me, and the rest of a surly, yet inquisitive world by the same website responsible for explaining why the McGriddle is the most popular breakfast item yet engineered by mankind that simultaneously exceeds the US RDA for fat, sugar, protein, jet fuel, complex carbohydrates, and artificial coloring. And if that’s not enough lipid loving goodness for you, it’s time to get shopping.

Update: Thanks to the work of an investigative correspondent, I can share this glimpse of the food of the gods with you.

I have to say that South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami was my least favorite book by him so far. However, I have pretty high standards for him, as I rank several of his other books among my all time favorites. It was a relatively light, quick read, which was okay for my flight from Denver to New Orleans a couple weeks ago. I made it almost all the way through the 213 pages in about two hours. Why I took the chance of blowing a sublime Murakami experience instead of blasting through my typical set of programming, bicycling, and business magazines, I’ll never know.

The protagonist is of classic Murakami form, an introspective Japanese man nearing middle age who loves jazz (same as Murakami, at least the jazz part), drinking solo, and occasionally wallowing in ennui. Missing, though, are the fantastical Borges-like moments that I loved so much in The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, A Wild Sheep Chase, and The Elephant Vanishes.

Nonetheless, it’s a crisp, beautiful story and is absolutely worth reading by any Murakami addict, like myself, as well as by anyone who loves powerful writing rich in symbolism. If you’re unfortunate enough not to have encountered any other works by Murakami, though, I would recommend starting with The Hard-Boiled Wonderland. And definitely, don’t read any of his books in a distraction-filled zone like an airplane. I may need to read this one again.