WirelessMoves

Just a little anecdote today: I travel a lot and one of the most important gadgets I take along (believe it or not) is a low tech power strip. Be it conferences where a single outlet per person at a table is already considered a luxury or in hotel rooms where outlets are equally scarce, the power strip comes increasingly handy. The picture on the left proves the point:

 

• Power for a computer
• Power to recharge the mobile phone
• Power to recharge the tablet
• Power to recharge my wife's mobile phone
• Power to drive my "Ownspot" Wi-Fi adapter to connect all those electronic gadgets to a single hotel Wi-Fi login or an Ethernet port.
• Power for the refrigerator in the room that had to be unplugged for the power strip.

I wonder when hotels will start renting them out to guests at the reception…

The title might be a bit misleading but the quotation marks are intentional. Windows 8 and the learning curve for its new user interface that is not everyone's taste offers an interesting opportunity to introduce some Linux goodness to those asking for advice when buying a new computer. Arguments such as Linux/Ubuntu being open source and users not being taken hostage by one software company or another are nice but usually do not stick with normal users. Fortunately I have accumulated a number of other arguments that I thought I'd recap in this post.

Boots fast: One of the main complaints I often hear is that despite Windows reacting strangely people are reluctant to reboot until it is really really necessary as shutting down Windows and rebooting it takes several minutes that seem to stretch into eternity while starring at the "welcome" message. Ubuntu on the other hand shuts down and reboots significantly faster. Not that it is often needed anyway.

Suspends fast: One of the things I find rather strange is that Windows 7 sometimes takes several minutes after closing the lid before it finally suspends to RAM and sometimes fails to do so at all. This is especially nerve rattling when you want to catch that plane or train or want to leave a place and you have to resort to putting the notebook in your backpack while the hard drive is still spinning and without knowing if it might just not suspend at all and dangerously heat. Ubuntu on the other hand suspends in a number of seconds. No guesswork.

No Viruses: Perhaps the biggest advantage is the absence of viruses. Not that the platform is invulnerable it's just that nobody cares. A strong argument for those having become infected before with all what it entails to get rid of the Trojan or virus afterward.

Network Manager: Windows 7 has done a lot to make Wi-Fi configuration quick and easy. But as soon as 3G USB sticks come into play third party management tools are required and mess up the process. Also, I have noticed over the years that Windows 7 seems to have a problem when switching between several Wi-Fi networks. At some point the driver hangs up and even disabling / enabling the hardware driver doesn't help. Only a reboot fixes things. Compare this to Linux/Ubuntu where everything is integrated into the network manager and things are straight forward with Wi-Fi, 3G and VPN connectivity all managed from a single drop-down list.

Skype stability: I use Skype a lot and over the years they haven't been able to develop a Windows version that doesn't crash after a while when frequently changing networks and VPNs, which is the case when you are mobile and want to be secure. What's even worse is that Skype hangs in such a peculiar fashion that it can't even be killed via the task manager. Only a reboot can fix the situation. On Linux/Ubuntu it crashes very very seldom and if it does it can be killed and restarted without a reboot.

Word/Open/LibreOffice: A number of years ago, this was a sore point as most people insisted on using Microsoft Office. But things have changed with Mac's having become more popular, people using OpenOffice/Libre Office a lot more and Microsoft Office versions now using several file formats. Document exchange has become a mess anyway due to formatting often being altered due to file format conversions and editing or correcting text by several people with different word processors. So resistance to move away from Microsoft Office is much lower than before. And one can of course take Microsoft Office to Linux / Ubuntu and use the license of the old PC there, either via Wine or in a virtual machine.

External devices just work without minutes of driver installs: Another irritating thing is that when Windows 7 is confronted with a new USB flash memory stick or hard drive it usually spends a long time installing drivers. What for? In Linux/Ubuntu the device is plugged in and a few seconds later the file manager pops up.

Updates do not reboot the computer: A frequent complaint I hear from Windows 7 users is that programs and the operating system constantly update themselves and require restarts. Ever had a monthly Windows security update that didn't require a reboot? Have you ever gotten stuck with an old Flash player because it has it's own update routine that is only invoked on reboot? Gone are the problems with Linux/Ubuntu that uses a central update facility for all programs including the web browser, flash and other programs constantly being updated. And unless a new kernel gets installed, no reboot is required. And even if, it doesn't nag you about it every hour.

Let's see if these reasons are enough to convince the uninitiated. I will keep you posted.

Over the years I've been using a cool Wiki called Wiki on a Stick (WoAS) that was based on a self modifying XHTML / Java Script web page to store my notes that do not end up on this blog. The advantage of using a Wiki over other forms of notes taking for me is the search functionality and fast accessibility. All was well until Mozilla decided at some point with Firefox 16 or 17 that they no longer support self modifying pages. So one day after innocently upgrading Firefox, WoAS suddenly stopped working. There we go, the pleasures of updating. But I've accumulated a lot of useful notes in the Wiki so I had to find a solution. This is how the following Odyssey began:

There seems to be a workaround by using Java functionality to store changes to the WoAS file. This was out of the question for me as Java is so riddled with security issues that I decided long ago to uninstall it. Also I thought about using an old Firefox version in a virtual machine for the Wiki but decided that this is not practicable in the long run to always have a VM running for just this application. For some time I hoped a fix would be found or the functionality would be put back in Firefox, perhaps disabled by default. But to the best of my knowledge this didn't happen even to this day and I needed another solution quickly anyway.

The first solution I used was to convert the WoAS Wiki into HTML pages and from there to a Word Document. This worked rather well but left me with a 350 page word document. For some time this worked to some degree. However, only being able to search linearly compared to page searches in a Wiki with a results page for multiple hits became too limiting so I set out to find another solution.

There are a number of good Wiki platforms out there but most of them focus on providing public services to more than one person. What I wanted was a simple to install solution for personal use and no access from the outside. Then I remembered that a long time ago I experimented with MoinMoin Wiki, a file and directory based platform that is easy to configure and to back up. While it can run on an Apache web server to serve as a public Wiki it also brings its own built in web server that can be restricted to localhost, i.e. no data is accessible over the network. So I checked out MoinMoin and found that it is still maintained and developed. Great!

Obviously a 350 page word document with about 250 Wiki entries can't be copied and pasted by hand into individual Wiki pages, so a different solution was required. Fortunately, the WoAS to HTML to Word conversion (!) left the original formatting intact so each page started with the page name in a specific style and indentation. Also, font formatting (bold, italics, etc.) and code snippets were all there as well. So I decided to program a Visual Basic Macro in Word to go through the document and create a MoinMoin compatible directory structure with pages for each entry. Obviously I also wanted to preserve the formatting in  the entries as well so I had to figure out how to analyze the formatting of each paragraph in Visual Basic and convert that to MoinMoin Wiki commands. Also it turned out that MoinMoin is quite picky on the characters used for filenames and the text contained in the files. Special characters used by word for quotation marks, dashes, etc. needed to be converted to plain ASCII characters as otherwise MoinMoin would just refuse to display a page and crash during a full search operation if even only one of those characters was encountered during the search. Quite an adventure but eventually I managed to convert almost everything with a Visual Basic script to the liking of MoinMoin and only had to manually convert characters in a few pages.

I cold have put that into the program as well but converting the 350 page document took well over half an hour. The process starts quite quickly but for some reason Visual Basic slows down significantly the further it went into the document. At some point I was wondering if it would ever finish. But it did and I am glad I have a fully working personal Wiki again with all my WoAS content and everything I added in Word afterward preserved.

As I am sure I'm not the only one with this problem, I've attached the code to this post. I am not sure how many people it will help due to the many conversion steps I did between WoAS and MoinMoin. However, even for a direct conversion from the WoAS file or HTML export to MoinMoin the script should contain good information on how MoinMoin expects the directory structure to be created and how the text formatting needs to be changed. If you give it a try, good luck and have fun!

Sub convertmoinmoin()

Dim sDirectory As String
Dim bIsFileOpen As Boolean
Dim bInCourierNewBlock As Boolean

sDirectory = "C:Dokumente und EinstellungenmDesktopwiki-export"
bIsFileOpen = False
bInCourierNewBlock = False

'find first new page paragraph
For iFirst = 1 To ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.Count
  If ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(iFirst).Range.Style = "Überschrift 1" Then Exit For
Next

For i = iFirst To ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.Count
                                   
    '————————————————————-
    'select the next paragraph and then get all properties for it
    '————————————————————-
           
    ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Select
           
    'The paragraph text is here
    sText = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Text
           
    'Style indicates new topic – new page "Überschrift 1"
    Style = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Style
                                   
    'formatting of the whole line, 99999 if several formats are used…
    Bold = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Bold
    Italic = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Italic
           
    'Font name courier new hints at program code to be treated specially
    Font = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Font.Name

    '0 if not a list, other if list
    ListType = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.ListFormat.ListType

    'Indent is >0 if the paragraph is indented! (NOTE: also for bulleted lists!)
    Indent = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.ParagraphFormat.LeftIndent
           
    '—————————————————————-
    'now analyze the paragraph
    '—————————————————————-
           
    'If a new entry is found, create a new subdirectory and topic file
    If ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Style = "Überschrift 1" Then
              
        'remove trailing line feed'
        sText = Left(sText, Len(sText) – 1)
       
        'replace a number of characters in the filename as MoinMoin
        'does not accept them
        sText = Replace(sText, Chr(147), "x")
        sText = Replace(sText, Chr(148), "x")
        sText = Replace(sText, Chr(150), "x")
        sText = Replace(sText, "-", "x")
        sText = Replace(sText, "/", "x")
        sText = Replace(sText, ",", "x")
       
        'Filename must not contain blanks, replace with "(20)"
        sText = Replace(sText, " ", "(20)")
              
        'only create a wiki page if line is not empty
        If Len(sText) > 1 Then
       
            'close the previous wiki page file
            If bIsFileOpen = True Then
              'if the previous wiki page file ended with a coding section
              If bInCourierNewBlock = True Then
                 Print #1, "}}}"
                 bInCourierNewBlock = False
              End If
             
              Close #1
            End If
       
            FileSystem.MkDir (sDirectory & sText)
            FileSystem.MkDir (sDirectory & sText & "revisions")
              
            Open sDirectory & sText & "current" For Output As #1
            Print #1, "00000001"
            Close #1
              
            Open sDirectory & sText & "revisions0000001" For Output As #1
           
           
            bIsFileOpen = True
        End If
                             
    Else 'the paragraph belongs to the current file
      
       'remove trailing line feed'
       sText = Left(sText, Len(sText) – 1)
      
       'Word uses special quotation marks, replace them with the ASCII character
       sText = Replace(sText, Chr(147), """")
       sText = Replace(sText, Chr(148), """")
      
       'Word uses special – sign, convert to ASCII character
       sText = Replace(sText, Chr(150), "-")

       '—————————————————————————–
       'Treat blocks in Courier New first (program code, no formatting to be applied)
       '—————————————————————————–
       If ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Font.Name <> "Courier New" Then
          If bInCourierNewBlock = True Then
             Print #1, "}}}"
             bInCourierNewBlock = False
          End If
       End If
      
       If ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(i).Range.Font.Name = "Courier New" Then
          If bInCourierNewBlock = False Then
             Print #1, "{{{"
             Print #1, sText
             bInCourierNewBlock = True
          Else
             Print #1, sText
          End If
      
       '———————————————–
       '…And now the rest of the formatting
       '———————————————-
      
       ElseIf ListType > 0 Then
          'paragraph is a bulleted list
          Print #1, " * " & sText
         
       ElseIf Bold = True Then
          Print #1, "'''" & sText & "'''"
      
       ElseIf Indent > 0 Then
           
          'if indent and italic
          If Italic = True Then
             Print #1, " . ''" & sText & "''"
          Else
             Print #1, " . " & sText
          End If
         
       Else 'just put the paragraph in the wiki file as it is
          Print #1, sText
       End If
      
           
    End If 'paragraph belongs to current file
Next

If bIsFileOpen = True Then Close #1

End Sub

While I was full of praise for the great Internet connectivity at the hotel I stayed when I was recently in St. Petersburg in Russia I also have to say a few words about the devastatingly bad 3G Internet connectivity of Beeline, one of mobile network operators in St. Petersburg.

To also be connected while on the move I had a local SIM card on a good data tariff that promised speeds up to 14 Mbit/s. In practice, I never saw more than one Mbit/s in the downlink direction and about half a Mbit/s in the uplink direction which is still good and usable if it was reliable. Unfortunately, while there was coverage and good signal strength in most places I was, getting IP packets through the link most of the time didn't work at all or only very slowly.

After a few days and trying the SIM card in a few devices to ensure this "non connectivity while having good coverage" is not the result of a device incompatibility, I gave up frustrated and just did what everyone else seemed to have done as well: Use the free and totally open Wi-Fi hotspots provided by most restaurants and cafes in town.

Quite frankly I wondered what the point is of rolling out a 3G network and then having such a crappy service? Sorry Beeline, that was the first and the last time I used your network. I wonder if MTS or other competitors would have been better?

… when the hotel has understood that:

a) the uplink is the bottleneck. If the hotel just uses a normal ADSL line, downlink speeds do not matter at all if it only takes a few guests to clog the uplink that just runs at a couple of hundred kilobits per second (see my recent uplink bottleneck post)

b) has enough bandwidth to allow streaming content at a megabit/s or so even when the hotel is well booked.

The reason I am writing this post is because when I was in St. Petersburg in Russia recently I was quite surprised that the Asteria hotel in which I stayed (no, this is not a sponsored post) had a 35 Mbit/s uplink and about the same downlink speed to servers in western Europe available, both speeds measured over the Ethernet port in my room. Needless to say that streaming high quality video from my preferred online store in the evening was not a problem.

While their Wi-Fi got quite unstable after a few days in my room and wouldn't recover, their Ethernet connectivity was top notch and their backhaul should not run out of steam even when the hotel is full. And as far as the Wi-Fi is concerned, the seasoned traveler uses a Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi/Ethernet hotspot anyway.

Quite frankly I'd like to see more hotels like this one on my travels that understand how to provide Internet access the right way! Kudos to the Asteria!

When I recently helped a friend to configure the email program on his Android phone I was quite happy to see that the auto configuration function worked pretty well. With only the email address and password, the program configured itself to send and receive email to one of Germany's national major email hubs. What I didn't like though is that both SMTP and POP3 where configured to use non encrypted communication.

In practice this is quite a serious shortcoming as many people still use Wi-Fi hotspots in restaurants, cafes, etc. and are thus very vulnerable to password and identity theft by simple Wi-Fi sniffing by a black hat sitting at the other end of the cafe, or just at the next table…

Yes, I am aware that there are quite a number of possible security settings email servers can use but I suppose a couple of trial and error attempts in the background to find the right one to use wouldn't hurt. And if still nothing can be found, open communication could be the last resort, combined with a warning to the user that the service has been configured without encryption. Let's hope we'll see this in the future.

No doubt, calendar and address book synchronization between PCs, smartphones and perhaps a web based interface is a convenient thing. However, so far I always stayed away from this as it meant handing over my data to a web based company. While I am sure that pretty much every online service has my phone number and email address by now from other people using Facebook, WhatsApp and other services that suck complete address books right out of smartphones, I at least didn't want to give my data myself to them. Also, to the best of my knowledge, my calendar information is still my own. O.k. a little bit less convenience but my data has remained private for the most part. But now there's a solution for this as Owncloud, that I started using for sharing files, also has calendar and address book sharing support.

I was quite amazed how simple it was as Owncloud uses CalDAV and CardDAV that are supported by quite a number of programs and operating systems. On the PC I use Thunderbird / Lightning for my calendar needs. Getting my Thunderbird calendar on my own Owncloud server at home was as simple as exporting all calendar entries in a file and pushing it via the web interface to the Owncloud file server. From there, a click on the file imports all calendar entries to one of the online calendars I created. Perfect, a 2 minute job for calendar entries of several years.

Synchronizing with Thunderbird is equally simple. Owncloud provides a URL for accessing the calendar via CalDAV which can be used in Thunderbird for accessing an online calendar. Another two minute job and I can see the calendar in Lightning and not only via Owncloud's web interface. Thunderbird also has the option of keeping an offline copy of the calendar. New entries or changes to an existing entry are immediately sent to Owncloud if a connection can be established. If not, Thunderbird saves the changes and can be made to send the changes once connectivity is available again. Perfect!

But of course all of this is of little use unless I can synchronize the calendar with my other devices as well. Android doesn't support CalDAV natively but "CalDAV-Sync beta" from the app store adds the functionality. With that I synched an HTC smartphone and a Samsung tablet with the Owncloud calendar and changes in Thunderbird or one of the mobile calendars replicated nicely to the other devices periodically or when triggered manually. I tried very hard to see if I could break synchronization in some way by deleting the same entry on several devices, by adding new entries simultaneously on different devices, etc. but all changes were always synchronized correctly to all devices. Perfect again!

And finally there's my address book that I'd really like to synchronize. Unfortunately there's no support for CardDAV in Symbian so the best I could do was to export all addresses from my N8 into 'vcf' files and then upload them to Owncloud. Again, the server immediately recognized the address files and added them to my cloud based address book at home. From there I can now easily access the address book via the Owncloud web interface and synchronize it to Android address books, again with a little helper program from the App store.

Almost perfect I'd say! The combination of address book and calendar synchronization might provide an incentive in the future to retire my N8 and go for an Android based device, while keeping the N8 for offline navigation and quality photography, two things that I still find lacking in any Android based device I've so far fancied.

Both thumbs up for Owncloud, and I'd raise two more if I could. Finally I am beginning to love the cloud, as my data is stored on my own hardware in my place and still accessible anywhere I am via secure http (and port forwarding from my DSL access point to my Owncloud server + Dyndns).

Here's a link to an interesting post over at AnandTech on Broadcom demoing their new LTE chipset running in a Band 17 (700 MHz) and Band 4 (1700 MHz) LTE carrier aggregation mode (10+10 MHz). AT&T owns spectrum in both bands so it's clear whom this targets. Also have a closer look at the pictures at the bottom of the post as they contain some further interesting details.

And here's AnandTechs report about LTE carrier aggregation demonstrated by ST-Ericsson. Interesting in the pictures at the bottom of the post is the band combinations shown, lots for the US, one for Korea and one for Japan. A good indication of who's going to use it first and who's not on the list at all (Europe!).

While in Europe, many network operators have 20 MHz of continuous spectrum and thus don't need carrier aggregation some indeed only use a 10 MHz channel in the 800 MHz band and might be tempted to add another 10 MHz from some of their other spectrum holdings in the future. But I guess US carriers are more starved for it than their European counterparts, who are still doing fine serving their customers data hungry devices on UMTS.

Kudos to AnandTech for reporting from MWC off the beaten smartphone path.

Before returning to the normal programming a quick thank you to all who have taken part in my survey from earlier in the week on how you read this blog. Out of the 160+ votes, 2/3 responded that they read this blog via an RSS Feed reader. I've also received a lot of comments and private emails on the topic confirming this an only two responders said they use something other than Google Reader. Looks like an overwhelming market share and lots of people will be looking for an alternative to Google Reader soon. My personal favorite today is the reader to be integrated into Owncloud and I will definitely keep you posted on my experience with it once it is released. And now back to wireless…

In a quick follow up to my post yesterday about the closure of Google Reader not only being a sad move but actually a chance for the web to develop I would be quite interested how many of you read this blog directly and how many of you use an RSS feed reader. If you could spare a couple of seconds I’d appreciate if you could take part in the poll below.

Thanks very much!