Google Voice really didn’t add anything new other than some interface modifications and instructions for mobile users, however it does bring the service one step closer to perfection. Here’s why: Most people are not going to spend the time figuring out how to forward their cell phone voice mails to Google Voice, but a few clicks gives you the exact sequence to type into your phone for your carrier.
Forwarding your cell phone calls to Google Voice for Voicemail enables voicemail transcription as well as the visual voicemail style audio file in an email message. If you have a smart phone such as a blackberry with the Google Voice application already installed, this just adds to the benefit. Now I am down to two voice mail boxes: Email and work. As soon as work converts to VoIP I suspect I can consolidate that to email as well.
The perfect Google Voice feature would be the ability to port an existing number to them. My home phone, for example, I have had for over 6 years. Everyone knows it and I don’t want to change it. I have ported that number from Verizon to Lingo to Packet 8 and then to ViaTalk. The problem is that each move is a time commitment. Each one had a year contract, but more importantly they had my phone number. If I could port my number to Google Voice, then I would have much more flexibility to try new services or multiple services, or even replacing the home phone with a cell phone. In the case of a cell phone though I would not want to commit my home phone number to it. With Google Voice I could simply forward my permanent number to which ever service I wanted to use at the time. Suddenly I could become completely carrier neutral. If I wanted to use MagicJack for a few days I could do that then switch back to ViaTalk, or even get a land line.
I believe that centralization of voice communication is the goal here, and as soon as I’m able to port my number to Google Voice they will have reached that goal.
Of course I’ve been using Windows 7 for longer than three days, but this is the third day having it on my old Dell XPS M1210. I just noticed recently that the poor laptop is coming up on its 3-year anniversary. It had a 3-year warranty with accidental damage coverage. The only stupid thing I ever did to it was to dump a can of soda into the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard by shopping on eBay and the touchpad buttons still have a slight issue, but I’ll live with it. Anyway, back to my story and the reason why this is relevant. The machine I had Windows 7 installed on at work was fairly new, and over its short pre-Windows 7 history it ran Windows XP 64bit and Debian when XP 64 wasn’t stable. Neither of these were installed for more than a month before Windows 7 was RTM.
My laptop, on the other hand, was used constantly for nearly three years under XP and Vista, so I have a pretty good idea of how it looks and performs. Everything seems to look better under Windows 7, and I’m not sure exactly why. I went through the cleartype configuration wizard, which may have been the reason this is better. As far as performance, I haven’t noticed much of a difference, but I didn’t really expect the speed to increase more than I just hoped it wouldn’t decrease. The laptop does run cooler now. Even when I’m doing more intensive things the fan seems to run less frequently and the bottom feels cooler.
Now I admit, these observations are not scientific. I didn’t measure the temperature of the bottom of my laptop after watching precisely 1 hour of HD content in both configurations. People’s impressions always trump scientific data anyway, as evidenced by Vista. The general impression of Vista was negative, so very few people actually tried it themselves. Windows 7 has the potential to be just as negative, especially since there are some big changes to the interface. Microsoft has done a good job of keeping the initial impressions positive, with only a few exceptions. There was an ignorant article on Federal Computer Week that described Windows 7 as Vista with only a very minor facelift, but not enough to be an improvement. It was obvious from reading it that the author either hadn’t used Vista or hadn’t used Windows 7.
Just as with Vista, people who don’t try it for themselves on decent hardware have no grounds to talk on it. Win 7 is a vast improvement over Windows XP and a valuable improvement over Vista. In my opinion there is no value in “upgrading” from Vista, however a clean install from XP or Vista is valuable if your hardware is reasonably fast. If you have a computer over 3 years old, a new computer is the best upgrade path.
Mozy has disappointed me. I have been unable to do a restore, and without a restore all the routine backups are worthless. The client has sat at “Connecting to backup service…” since I kicked it off yesterday. I’m going to need to reboot soon, so we’ll see if that fixes things. Windows Home Server appears to be able to perform a complete backup of this laptop now, so I’m feeling better about that. I’m going to blow away my desktop and try a full system restore from Windows Home Server and if that works I’m going to start feeling a little better about trusting it.
The big question I had was whether or not entering a retail code into the RTM code would work. It did not work for me.
Now that I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional on my Dell XPS M1210, I thought I’d go through a little of the process so far. First of all, I used the upgrade version, but did a clean install. I verified also that the old trick about installing without a key, not activating, and then using the upgrade key still works. I am upgrading from Vista, but I wiped it out first (dban) in order to try since I had heard conflicting reports on the net about that.
So now the reload process is in full-swing. First on were some windows patches that included a driver for my Nvidia GO 7400 card. A previous install I had attempted to find drivers directly through Nvidia. I went through a few attempts to install a version that wasn’t specifically for my card by changing the INF file. It worked, but I see no advantage of that over the built-in driver, and the built-in driver is certainly easier to install. I installed the Windows 7 compatible Synaptics driver as well because I like the scroll zones and a couple other features of the touchpad.
Next on was ESET Internet Security, my favorite AV software at the moment. Note that these things change as soon as a company starts getting the idea of packing their software full of useless additional components that slow a computer down more than help it (Symantec I’m looking at you, which I dropped shortly after 2000, and also Trend Micro which I dropped around 2007, but should have dropped sooner – you can thank a corporate agreement for keeping me that long).
Next on was Office 2007 Enterprise (thanks to work for the home licensing arrangement). Now I’m starting to see a trend of patch, reboot, patch, reboot for Microsoft things. I’ve done this 4 times now, and although Microsoft Update says I’m done, my AV software says it detects missing patches. Interesting.
Next on was TrueCrypt which recently updated to 6.3 for what they call full Win 7 support. I’m not sure what exactly changed, but it works fine. I run full-disk encryption on my laptop. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to do the same.
Next on was Free File Sync, an open source Windows based synchronization GUI which I used to restore my previously synchronized folders from the Windows Home Server that I’ve been evaluating. While that was synchronizing I kicked off the encryption process for TrueCrypt and downloaded Mozy. I remembered that I used my own encryption key and that it was stored in Roboform, so I downloaded, installed, and re-activated my copy of Roboform in order to pull out my custom key. I need to remember to locate and test my offline copy of that key or there’s little point in my using Mozy in a disaster recovery situation.
I made an image of my system with Acronis prior to wiping it out. For reasons I’ll describe later, I still do not trust Windows Home Server completely. I am not going to put Acronis back on for several reasons. First, Windows Home Server is supposed to be able to do image restores of my OS, so I’m going to do some testing to verify that works properly. Second, Acronis does a major release way too often, and I can’t afford to keep purchasing the software. The version 2009 of their software is not Windows 7 compatible, and they want another $30 in order to upgrade to 2010. If I need that image, and I probably will, I will install my license on another PC and use it to restore. Between Mozy, my offline backups, and Windows Home Server, I just don’t need an additional solution.
Somewhere in there I managed to get Firefox installed. The integration between Firefox and Windows 7 “feels” tighter than it did with Vista. It is hard to describe really, but links appear to open more quickly now, and I haven’t had anything strange happen yet.
I have a RTM build of Windows 7 on my work desktop. I brought up task manager after leaving the system on for about a week and found the following:
Now I am trying to use the machine just like I would use Vista or XP except that I, until this point, hadn’t yet loaded firefox to do the majority of my browsing. This machine has 8 total cores and 16GB of RAM in it, so wasn’t experiencing any performance issues using this much RAM, but it still seems excessive. Normally with past Internet Explorer use I try to make a habit of closing tabs and restarting the browser occasionally, but as I said I was trying to treat it the same way I would firefox and put it through its paces.
Anyone else experience this? I’m not sure if the excessive amount of RAM that I have is part of the reason this happened. In other words, would this have happened if I had 2GB of RAM? Are they caching data in RAM such as my browsing history to make it quick to go back?
I was reading about the recent Twitter DOS that also affected Facebook and particularly the comments posted on CNN about how not having Twitter made people feel naked. One person interviewed said that people knew everything about her life because of Twitter.
I have always been a little hesitant to post online status. After all, those really close to me already know what I’m doing, and those who are not so close to me could always fire off an email and/or ask to be put back onto my mailing list. Why does the public in general need to know if I’m heading to the grocery store, or even on vacation for two weeks.
Smart criminals are few and far between, however they do exist. It is not difficult to tie a twitter account or Facebook account to a physical address. If your schedule is half-way routine the smart criminal can take advantage of it, but if it is posted online the criminal doesn’t need to go very far to target your house, apartment, or vehicle. Even more concerning is personal safety and security. Do you twitter about when you are getting off work? Do you have a long walk to your car? Scary stuff.
What it comes down to is our desire as people to be popular and important, but the fact of the matter is that few of us are or ever will be. And if we suddenly were popular we probably wouldn’t be all that happy about it. There isn’t a lot of glamor in having news crews camp on your lawn day after day, and if someone is always around the corner looking for a photo opportunity, there’s little time to relax.
My suggestion to the die-hard Twitter and Facebook addicts: Be safe! Think about what information you post online and how it could be used against you both at your current stage in life and years into the future. Will your kids use it against you? Your relatives? A criminal? If you suddenly did become a public figure? Just think about it – and don’t get so attached to a single entity such as Facebook in particular. I know people who don’t use email much anymore because they can just message back and forth on Facebook’s mail. That’s all fine and good except for when Facebook disappears, suffers a DOS or decides to change their privacy policies. If you rely on Facebook for email, how would you contact your friends if it suddenly went away?
In a nutshell it seems as if the lead developer for CentOS, which is a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, has disappeared. Now, before I begin, I’d like to point out that – and I come into this information late – it seems to me that step one would be to determine if the guy is actually alright and not stuck between a toilet and a door, or something similarly unpleasant. Maybe they have already done this, but I don’t know.
We’ve certainly lost a little sleep with the likes of LinuxNetworx who went under shortly after accepting payment on a 3-year support contract. Then SGI who stepped in to pick up the pieces but refused to honor the contract also went belly up and invalidated all prepaid support contracts leaving our old SGI machines in the lurch. Still, there’s nothing quite as disconcerting as a project as large as CentOS that relies so heavily on one single individual.
This is just a very brief rant, but if you run your business on or with Linux, use something that is supported commercially.
Since I am on vacation at the moment, this touches close to home. Why is it nearly 2010 and we still do not have cheap ubiquitous internet access anywhere? I arrive at my in-laws house and they don’t have a wireless connection, but they do have a DSL “modem” directly connected to a laptop. Makes sense?
Lucky for me I carry a Pocket Router with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.
The inbetween is where everything breaks down. Sure, almost every truck stop is now outfitted with “free wi-fi” and every cheap hotel has it, so you can just drive into the Super 8 parking lot and get online, but that certainly isn’t convenient when you just want to check your email before going to bed, or if your passenger wants to research hotels or attractions in that town that is 100 miles away while you drive.
So the United States is just too big for its own good. Either that or cell phone providers are afraid to provide affordable connectivity that is not attached to a 2-year contract. My suggestion to Verizon (or AT&T) is to change that $15 plan to $15 for 0.5 – 1GB of data but with a 1-week duration. AT&T’s $60/month plan caps at 5GB so this pay-as-you go would be close to being in line with that but without the commitment. When someone exceeds the limit they could start the week over. For everyone else who really just wants to browse the web or use email it would last a week and encourage that ubiquitous environment that everyone wants.
Now the new iPhone would actually tempt me if they allowed tethering at a reasonable price. Until that point I am 100% uninterested.
There are a few camps of thoughts on certifications. But first I want to talk about the types of certified people. First is the certification nut who has half a dozen or more after his or her name. These are typically instructors, or people with a job that is relatively un-demanding enough to provide them the time and opportunity to pursue all these certifications. They may or may not be qualified, but it doesn’t matter much because most people will see all of those and immediately classify them in the “they know a lot” category. Also included in this category are people who feel personally validated by their certifications and will spend personal time, money, and effort to get certifications that really are mostly common sense.
The second is the “required certification” individual. These individuals have one, maybe two certifications, but typically don’t show them off. Typically these are people who perform a job that requires them to go get a certification to prove what they already perform, however it may also be someone who is attempting to further his or her career and managed to take vacation from their real job to get certified.
The third type is the person who has no certifications, but has more qualifications than any of the above. These are people who managed to land in a career, or make a name for themselves without the certifications. Their position and knowledge precludes the need for certifications. These people may find themselves in the second category because of a government or industry regulation that suddenly requires them to prove what they already know. This type typically disdains the first two categories.
The fourth type is the (typically younger) person who is trying to make their way in the business but doesn’t have a job that will fund their certifications or doesn’t have the job they want because they don’t have the required certifications. These type are envious of all of the above, but lack traction to get moving. Occasionally these people are self-taught starters that businesses could snap up for really cheap by dangling the certification carrot in front of them, although any time a business invests in the education of its employees it must be willing to follow through on the investment with increased compensation or improved work conditions, otherwise it sets itself up to lose its best employees.
Those are all general camps and some people won’t fall into any of them, or more than one. The craziest thing about it is that the people in-the-know understand that a certification is less about what you know but more about what you are willing to spend to get yourself to where you want to go. The certifications themselves mean little. Know any A+ people? I know a few who couldn’t tie their shoes let alone plug an IDE cable in the right way. There’s nothing worse than someone who brags about having their A+ certification because it immediately tells you two things: First, the person is proud of a certification that sets the bar so low that most people in the industry could walk into the test without studying and pass the test. Second, because the person hasn’t been in the industry long enough to realize this. Double whammy: go home, or go work at Best Buy and tell grandmothers that they need a $300 discrete video card so the pictures from their grandkids will look better.
It is similar with other certifications, but to lesser degrees. For example the CCNA cert is one that requires a decent amount of Cisco knowledge to pass, but not necessarily real-world experience. They have made the test more challenging by requiring a troubleshooting lab piece to it, but this increases the cost of the exam and throws CCNAs into situations they may rarely face in their jobs, depending on their jobs. For example, a WAN guy for a large company might be asked to configure a switch – something he never does on the job, or a LAN guy for a multi-site enterprise who, because of policy, can’t touch anything past his LAN. There is little doubt these people know their stuff, but either one would have trouble walking into the test and passing it based on their real-world practical experience alone. Yet there are IT managers with this certification who never touch a switch or router except when they are in training for certifications. They learn what they need to know for the exam, pass it, and then move on.
The more this happens, the more diluted (the less valuable) the certification becomes. Eventually it becomes like a Microsoft cert or A+ where no one really cares, and the people who hold those certs are scorned by their peers for being so naieve to think the cert is still valuable.
The company I work for recently published a policy forbidding blogging while at work. From first glance this looks like a natural and normal thing – why should they provide resources to enable people to blog. Blog from home on your own time and with your own resources. At second glance this is a little scary for the paranoid blogger. Read the rest of this entry »
This month marks two years for my Vista install on my laptop. It is absolutely the best operating system I’ve ever used. Here’s what would have happened to me had I installed a different operating system two years ago:
Windows XP – the next logical choice: My laptop would have been reloaded 3 times since and I would be getting ready to reload again now. Most of my XP installations had to be reloaded every 6 months.
Linux: Month of my life wasted on emerge (if Gentoo). Months of my life wasted on troubleshooting hardware and getting sleep, wireless, etc, just right. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but I’ve never had any success making everything work perfectly on a laptop, and by perfectly I mean that I can keep it running for a month without rebooting it – just putting it in sleep and hibernation when not in use.
I’m looking forward to upgrading to Windows 7 when it comes out. I’ve been running Windows 7 on another test machine at work and so far it seems pretty nice, and faster than Vista on the same hardware.
I’m having something happen to me that has never happened before. I’m getting bored with an install. Nothing is going wrong on my laptop. There’s nothing for me to tweak, nothing to fix, nothing I need to change. It just works exactly how I need it to when I need it to. Maybe it is time to start dual-booting something else.
with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.
Entries (RSS)