WirelessMoves

Cloud services seem to be dying at an ever increasing rate these days. A year or two things started for me with Delicious abandoning its popular bookmark service, followed by the announcement of Google to discontinue their RSS reader at some point this year. And now Wetpaint has decided to block the Prepaid Wireless Internet Access Wiki that they hosted on their servers for many years without giving any reasons or warning. Ouch.

Over the years Wetpaint seems to have changed its focus several times and today the hosted Wikis seem to be little more than an unloved project on the side for them. Already over the last year I have noticed that the server the Prepaid Wireless Internet Wiki is hosted on has become slower and slower to the point of being of little use. That should have been a warning sign and an incentive to think about moving the content. But I didn't…

Now the Wiki is blocked and there is no way to export the pages. Support on the Wetpaint Central site for such issues also seems to be zero and all my inquiries have been left unanswered so far. And so once more the lesson is: Never trust a cloud service, your data could be gone in the blink of an eye without any warning.

Too bad, the Wiki has proven to be quite useful over the years.

Here's a question I haven't got an answer for that you might be able to help me with. Who pays whom in the following scenario?:

• A = User
• B = DSL Access Provider
• C = Transit Provider
• D = Video Portal

Obviously the user (A) pays the DSL Access Provider (B) a monthly fee for the DSL line rental

The Video Portal (D) pays the Transit Provider (C) since it sends a lot of data into the network towards the user.

Based on the business model User (A) might pay the Video Portal (D) a fee or the Video Portal is cross-financed in another way, e.g. advertising.

And here's the question: What is the business relationship between the DSL access provider (B) and the Transit Provider (C)? The majority of data exchanged flows from Transit Provider (C) to the DSL access provider (B). Who pays whom at this interface?

Any insight and references are greatly appreciated!

Spring has kept us waiting here in Germany for quite long this year. At some point in March I was so fed up with standing on icy cold train station platforms so I decided to take the car for a couple of days and rather endure the traffic jams. While that has certainly helped against the cold weather I noticed to my surprise after a week that my personal email inbox kept getting bigger and bigger and my blogging rhythm had significantly slowed down. I would have thought I'd implicitly reinvest the time I save taking the car into doing these tasks at  different time of the day. But no, that time just went somewhere else. So while commuting with the train usually takes longer than going to work by car this experience shows quite nicely that it is definitely not wasted time at all. Quite the contrary. In other words, working on these things while on the move is not limiting due to less space, more noisy environment, etc. but rather enabling!

In a previous post I've been looking at the pros and cons of my recent switch from Symbian to Android. One of the reasons to go for a dual-device strategy and still keep a Symbian device for taking high quality pictures and for road navigation is that I haven't found an Android device yet that comes close in either of these categories. As far as navigation is concerned here are some more details why:

Note by the way, that I am comparing Google Maps to the Symbian version
of Nokia maps and not the Windows phone version. I'm not familiar with
the Windows phone version of the program so I have no idea how it
compares to the Symbian implementation.

Before listing the cons I'd like to mention one feature I really like about Google Maps which is not implemented as nicely in Nokia Maps on Symbian: Real time traffic situation overview that is updated every couple of minutes. Especially for my daily commute I am now checking regularly while on the road if there's a traffic jam at two neuralgic points and take an alternate route before getting stuck. It works perfectly!

On the other hand, there are quite a number of features that are much better implemented in Nokia Maps for Symbian:

Offline Routing Capability

Let's bring up the biggest issue first. I travel a lot to foreign countries and roaming charges for data are usually highly prohibitive. In other words there is no way I can use Google maps abroad as it requires a data connection to download maps for car navigation or using it for guidance while on foot. For Nokia Maps on my Symbian device I have maps of all the countries I travel to on the device. Sure, that takes a couple of gigabytes of flash memory but there's more than enough in today's devices.

Routing

The routing algorithm in Google Maps is a bit strange and has led me several times through cities instead of using the bypasses which might not be as direct but much faster due to no traffic lights and city speed limits. Also in my home city, when I used navigation just to see what it would do has let me to the destination via roads which were neither direct nor optimal. Doing the same with Nokia maps has found the direct and best way. So still a bit of work to do for the Google team here.

No Speed Indication

Another thing which I like very much when being guided by a navigation system is to see the speed as calculated by the GPS receiver, which is much more accurate than my car's built in speedometer and also closer to other information such as routing and and speed limit data. Unfortunately Google Maps in navigation mode doesn't show the current speed.

No Speed Limit Indication

What I really have come to like in Nokia maps is that it shows the current speed limit next to my current speed and starts changing the background color of the speed indication to red and also gives an audible warning if desired. From my experience that maximum speed limit indication is very accurate. In Germany, where speed limits on the freeway changes every few kilometers for some reason or another it's easy to miss a speed limit sign just before a speed camera… This feature has saved me tons of money already and relieves me of being constantly on the lookout for speed limit signs. Unfortunately that's not available in Google maps yet and a real killer feature for me!

No Lane Assistant

Next in the list of missing features is the lane assistant. Nokia Maps and most other navigation systems that have been around for some time indicate to the driver in cities and at freeway exits which lanes to to take as this can sometimes be confusing. While not a must have feature for me it helps orientation in crucial moments.

No Distance Indication

Google likes to show the approximate time to the destination. That's nice but I'm an engineer, I like the hard facts, I want to know the remaining kilometers or miles. In Nokia Maps the display can be switched between the two.

Navigation in Tunnels

An important feature when driving through tunnels is that the navigation system keeps updating the approximate position even when no GPS signals is available as otherwise one easily misses exits that come right after the tunnel. A couple of years ago Nokia Maps didn't have that functionality and I was really happy when they added it. Unfortunately, Google Maps doesn't have this feature so far. Which means missing exits…

Horrible Pronunciation of Street Names

I usually disable voice guidance and just use the map. However, there are some exceptions during which I use voice Guidance. I use an Android device with the language set to English and Google maps assumes I want to hear the direction announcements in English, too. While this is true in general it unfortunately also announces the street names in English no matter in which country I am. To a native speaker, German or French street names with English pronunciation just hurts. Sorry Google, I'd really like to be able to switch that off if the maps application can't pronounce street names correctly and just be audibly informed which direction to go and when to make a turn. No pronunciation torture, please!

There we go. While some of the reasons are not really a show stopper, the missing speed indications in combination with the sub-optimal rooting and missing country-wide offline capability will make me stick with my dual device strategy for the foreseeable future.

I think the last time I was really excited about EDGE, the data transmission technology of GSM, was back in 2010. Back in 2008 there was a lot of activity around Evolved EDGE with it's main feature bundling several carriers to increase single user speeds. Since then it has become pretty quiet.

Back in 2010 I had a brief personal resurgence of interest while having been in Thailand and depending on EDGE for connectivity. Since then, however, 3G and also LTE networks have increased their coverage areas in Europe and the US considerably. That's good as web pages are becoming ever more complex and require tons of data to be downloaded. In addition, cloud services that are becoming ever more popular and require more and more data being shuffled back and forth.

So in retrospect my interest in EDGE has noticeably diminished in the past 4 years up to the point where I wouldn't even consider it as a kind of spare backup. It has become too slow for how I interact with the network today.

I also haven't heard much from Evolved EDGE since back in 2008 so I don't think there's a lot of activity to bring this from paper to practice. Certainly not in countries that already have LTE deployed. So I can but just wonder what the options are in evolving countries with little 3G or LTE coverage yet!? I have no hard facts but I have a feeling that Evolved EDGE is not the way they will take either.

After Nokia made its fateful decision to discontinue Symbian, not to evolve Meego and instead focus on a proprietary and closed operating system I've been looking elsewhere for the past two years for my next smartphone. Two years have come and gone and my N8 has served me well. But all good things have to come to an end eventually and when the phone's camera recently quit I decided it was time to move on. Hello Android! This is a summary of the first chapter of what is likely to be a love/hate relationship for quite some time to come and I'm working very hard on giving this a good ending.

The Bad Things – In Brief

About a year ago I ran a post titled "At Least 9 Things I Want To Change For My Next Android Phone". Unfortunately all but one, the smaller display, have still not happened. Multitasking remains uninspiring to this day compared to Symbian as even in Android 4.1 the web browser and my ebook readers keep exiting once put into the background for a while. Also, there's still no usable offline car navigation that works globally, no native SMS remote lock, few models with a usable camera, no Xenon flash, no time and date on the display while the screen is switched off, etc. etc. Yes, I miss Symbian dearly but buying another Symbian based device for my primary use seemed to be a dead end as well.

A Dual Strategy to Ease the Pain

So I decided on a dual strategy: A Symbian based Nokia 808 Pureview for my camera and offline maps and global car navigation option when necessary and a Samsung Galaxy S-III Mini as my primary device for day to day use.

The Good Things – In More Detail

So while there are all those shortcomings mentioned above and more, there are a number of advantages as well about which I am actually quite happy. First and foremost there's the calendar and address book synchronization with my Owncloud server at home that works just perfectly. Without that I would seriously consider going back to Symbian once more. In other words, that's the killer feature for me!

In the also run category is the Kindle App. "What!?" you might think now in case you've read this blog for a while now, how come he's into such an app with so many privacy leaks? Well, nobody's perfect and I'm restricting myself to get the ebook versions of only those books I don't want to physically own anyway. Should they be gone one day, well, let them be gone. In the meantime I enjoy being able to read a book on the smartphone while on the move, on the tablet at home and sometimes on the PC screen as well. I'm shuddering a bit at the thought that I implicitly tell Amazon a lot about my reading behavior by letting the apps synchronize with the central server but I like to think it is only an exception to my general rule that I like my privacy and that my data is my own. To make up for it at least a little bit I use the open source FB reader and Project Gutenberg for the classics.

On the browser front I have switched from Opera Mini to Opera Mobile. The browsers pretty much look and feel the same with the advantage of Opera Mobile not doing server side compression and hence protecting my privacy a bit more. Also, I prefer it over Google's browser as no personal information is leaking to Silicon Valley that way and because I much prefer Opera Mobile's zoom and text reflow feature at any zoom level over Google's implementation. Try it and you will see what I mean. And for those cases when I really need network side compression, i.e. when network coverage is weak or prices abroad are high I've installed Opera Mini as well. Works like a charm.

But that's pretty much my list of things that I perceive are better than on Symbian. Obviously I also use email on the smartphone and have opted for K-9 mail, again to get a bit of additional independence from Google. I am still considering a bit going back to Profimail that also exists on Android now as I perceive K-9 mail as inferior to Profimail that I have used for many years now. But that's not decided yet, the lure of open source is a strong counter weight to it being somewhat less user friendly.

Then there's the camera in the Galaxy Mini which obviously comes nowhere close to the N8's capabilities. I still hope it will prove to be enough for everyday situations and that the 808 is at close hand when a good lens is needed. Google maps is good for finding local stuff but navigation comes nowhere close to Nokia maps navigation on Symbian. More about that in a separate post.

On the alarm clock functionality is a bit of a mixed bag. The alarm clock itself was much easier to handle on the Symbian side but after a couple of weeks of using the Samsung alarm clock application I think I have gotten the hang of it. On the pro side I like the stopwatch and countdown timer functionality that was not natively available on Symbian.

And finally there's a podcasting app that works for me, just too bad there's no FM transmitter so I have to search for a different solution to listen to podcasts in the car. Still working on that. This is slightly offset by the the "DB navigator" app, giving me train time tables and status in real time, much superior to the web based version I've been using on Symbian.

Summary

I wished that having taken up something new would have meant that everything has gotten better. Unfortunately it's not the case. Symbian's dead end on the one hand and killer functionality like Owncloud integration on the other hand will probably make my stay with Android for the time being. Not that I am truly happy about it but I am not too sad either. So I keep hoping that Android will get some more of those 9 things I listed a year ago and that one day I can give up my dual device strategy and have good imaging capabilities and offline car navigation together with all the other cool features in a single device. To be continued…

So far I've only seen two ways of handing out spectrum to companies:

Some countries assign spectrum to companies in what is called a 'beauty contest' for relatively little money to companies the national regulator sees as the most promising ones to quickly deploy and operate a network. The advantage is that companies have to pay relatively little for the spectrum and thus have more money to deploy a network and potentially lower prices for customer.

Other countries use an auction scheme which has the advantage that the price is decided by 'the market', i.e. by companies bidding reasonable sums for the spectrum. Unfortunately this does not always work and companies have massively overspent on spectrum licenses in the past. Remember the 50 billion Euros paid for a few MHz of 2.1 GHz beachfront property for UMTS in Germany and the UK around 15 years ago? But still, countries going for an auction usually saw them trough till the bitter end, no matter what the consequences. That is, until now…

Earlier this month, the Czech regulator canceled the ongoing spectrum auctions for LTE and other radio technologies when the bidding price exceeded 780 million euros. This might not sound much but one has to set this sum into perspective with the population of the country, which is about 10 million. In Germany, the LTE spectrum auction back in 2010 yielded 4.4 billion Euros in a country with a population of around 85 million. In other words, the regulator stopped the auction when in Germany the sum would have been well over 6 billion.

So from my point of view the Czech regulator has to be commended to take the unprecedented step of stopping the auction. After all, a spectrum auction is not (only) there to raise money for the treasury but should actually serve two other purposes:

• Improving network coverage
• Lower prices for consumers

This reminds me of a very insightful post over at Stephen Temple's blog which I wrote about a few months ago. Finally a country that has acted along these lines. That just leaves the question of how the Czech regulator wants to change the rules to still have a fair bidding process and still avoid excessive prices? Perhaps by changing tactics by considering a 'beauty contest'?

Leading a mobile lifestyle, one of the most crucial application for me is the possibility to access the screen, mouse and keyboard of remote computers to support friends and loved ones when they ask for help with their computers. On my end, I am using Remmina, a VNC compatible remote viewer. On Windows hosts, I've been relying on Tightvnc server for years and on Ubuntu hosts, the built in Vino server has served me well. Unfortunately, Vino has developed some serious issues over the years.

In the current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) and also in the current Ubuntu 12.10, Vino behaves very strangely on all machines I tried it with. The screen refreshes only very slowly in 12.04 to the point of being unusable and in 12.10, vino fully occupies one processor core and has interoperability issues with Remmina. I was really disappointing about this because without being able to support an Ubuntu installation remotely I can't recommend any of my friends to make the switch from Windows. 

I hoped that the situation would improve over time, with Ubuntu fixing whatever is wrong with Vino. Unfortunately even a year later the situation has not improved. So I set out a couple of weeks ago to look for alternatives. Finally I came across X11VNC, available in the Ubuntu distro so no complicated software installation is required. I never heard about it before so you can imagine that I was a bit sceptical    . Why should it be any better than Vino I thought? But I gave it a try anyway and was surprised of how easy it is to set up and I've been using it for several weeks now without any major hick-ups.

To get going, just ensure that the Vino VNC Server built into Ubuntu is not active (by default it is switched off). Before starting X11VNC for use, create a password on the remote machine with the following command to ensure that only authorized people can access it:

x11vnc -storepasswd

And once that is done, the server is started with the following command:

x11vnc -usepw -display :0

With this command the VNC server is started and stoped once the first client that attaches to it exits. There are also options to make the server run persistently or even as a service.

And one feature that I really find useful, which Vino didn't even have in the first place, is being able to make reverse connections, i.e. the person that requests help can connect back to you so there is no hassle with finding out IP addresses, creating NAT forwardings, etc. etc. in the network of the person that is to be supported. Here's the command for it:

x11vnc -usepw -display :0 -connect x.x.x.x   (x.x.x.x being an IP address or host name)

Works like a charm! And finally, there's even an option to encrypt the data going over the line with built in SSH support. There we go, simple to install, simple to use, big problem fixed!

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.