Category Archives: General

EBay and voice service

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So EBay thinks that voice calls will be free in the future because calls will be subsidized by advertising. This was their justification for paying way too much for Skype. How they came to this conclusion is beyond me. If anything current trends seem to me to indicate that consumers will use whatever technology they can to avoid ads.

An obvious example is the success that Google has enjoyed with Adwords. Google’s Adwords advertising system is far less intrusive than the previous favourite Internet advertising mechanism, the graphical banner ad. The fact that there are many pieces of software available whose sole purpose is to block banner ads provides another example.

The growing success of PVRs that make it quick and easy to time shift content and skip commercials also shows this trend. One of the main reasons I hear from people for downloading TV shows instead of watching them on normal TV is that it allows them to skip the commercials.

I can’t help but wonder, and hope, that we are entering an era when the Internet has reduced distribution costs to the point that news and even entertainment content will no longer need to be subsidized by advertising. At present advertisers have a lot more control over the content than most people would like to believe. News outlets may be hesitant to report something that is critical of a major advertising customer. Some TV shows have been canceled not because of lack of audience but because advertisers decided they didn’t want to buy ads during the show.

Personally, I will be quite happy to continue paying for my voice service if it means I don’t have to listen to an ad before making a call. Maybe someday I will also be able to pay for a TV show with money instead of my free time.

Vonage

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I have been meaning to experiment with VoIP service for a while now. So when the Vonage sales droids called me the other day offering a free month of service I thought I would give it a go.

It only took a couple of days for the Motorola box to arrive. This box is basically a VoIP to POTS converter. Ethernet in and two POTS RJ-11 jacks out. Setup is simple, hookup the Ethernet port and plug-in a phone.

So far I am pretty impressed with the service. No one I have spoken to in the last week has said anything that would indicate the quality was different from my old POTS line. I have been able to make the quality bad by starting a large upload while talking on the phone but this is party due to my network topology. Instead of putting my home network behind the Vonage Motorola box so that it can do some QoS magic I have simply plugged it into my LAN. My home network configuration has some routing requirements that make it impossible for me to put their box out front. I’m pretty sure I can deal with this quality problem with the Linux QoS features on my router anyway.

What I like most about the service is that everything can be controlled from the Vonage website. Setting up call forwarding is as simple as typing in the phone number. No more *91, wait five seconds etc. What I like even more is that voice mail messages are accessible online. You can listen, save and delete your messages from the website.

Another nice feature is being able to take your VoIP to POTS box to any location with high speed Internet. This means your home number can now travel with you. Vonage also sells a soft phone service so that you can use a SIP client on a PC or laptop while traveling. This avoids carrying the converter around.

I haven’t decided yet if this is just an experiment or if I will be canceling my Bell POTS line but it is definitely looking good.

London blog

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The London Fog is a blog that is focuses on events local to London, ON, CA. I discovered this blog via the Weblogs at Western site.

London Fog is anything but unbiased. The headline reads “Documenting the continuing mismanagement of London, Ontario by its people and municipal government.” At least the author isn’t pretending to be a fair source. This is a good example of one thing I like about blogs; the bias is usually much easier to detect than it is in main stream media.

I’m not a big fan of the conservative ideas == good, liberal ideas == bad ideology that appears to frequent the posts but at least London Fog covers some local topics.

x86_64 FC4 and Open Office

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While attempting to compile some software on my x86_64 FC4 system I ran into a strange problem. For some reason the compile was trying to link against an i386 library. My first thought was why are there i386 libraries on my x86_64 Linux installation? Well it turns out that OpenOffice is not 64-bit clean. So, in order to have OpenOffice in x86_64 FC4 all libraries on which OpenOffice depends must be present in i386 form. This leads to duplication since the rest of the system wants the x86_64 versions. Of course this wastes a bit of disk space but disks are cheap. What is more unfortunate is that loading the i386 version of OpenOffice requires a whole bunch of i386 libraries to be loaded into memory when x86_64 equivalents are already loaded.

Lately, I have been using Gnumeric and Abiword for my office application needs so I do not require OpenOffice. Thus, removing OpenOffice and all other i386 packages from my system was the simple solution to my library linking problems.

Gnumeric and Abiword are available in the extras repository, just run “yum install gnumeric abiword”.

FC4 and CD verification

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For the last several versions the Fedora Core (and previously RedHat) distribution has had the ability to verify that the downloaded CD images were successfully transfered to the newly burned discs. For people who download the images and create CDs themselves this is a fabulous feature; I am sure it has saved people from broken installations. However, as I discovered it can also lead a bit of pain.

Last week I downloaded all of the FC4 disc images and preceded to burn them to CD. After rebooting to install using the new media I discovered that the CD verification was failing for three of the five discs. So, I burned them again. Same result. Having used the CD verification for many years I had no reason to doubt it. Eventually I gave up and asked Bob to burn me a copy. Strangely, these CDs failed the verification phase as well.

Realizing that something strange was going on I started googling for similar experiences. It turns out that the CD verification can fail on certain hardware. I had simply never ran into this problem before because this was my first Fedora install on my new computer.

The solution is to boot the installation kernel with an option which tells it not to use DMA for IDE devices. At the GRUB prompt type ‘linux ide=nodma”. After doing this all discs passed their tests. There is one catch though, the Fedora installer is quite smart. If you use a kernel option to do the installation the installer decides this option must be required for successful operation. After installation I had to remove “ide=nodma” from /etc/grub.conf.

If the above wasn’t enough of an adventure I also managed to cause myself some extra pain. When I asked for a copy of FC4 to be created for me I never specified which version. My new computer has a x86_64 processor. The FC4 installation discs I borrowed were for the i386 version. After a day or so of use I realized the mistake and reinstalled with the discs that first caused the problems.