Anarchogeek: _uacct = "UA-77396-1"; urchinTracker();  Anarchogeek Dear Lazyweb: What's a good prosumer soho wifi / router / access point? So i’m sick of flaky wifi / routers / access points. I’ve had netgear’s, d-link’s, belkin’s, and linksys routers. To me they all were about the same, which is to say they worked some of the time. Before i go back to getting one more of the same to replace my now limping netgear, i’ve thought, what if i got something more than the cheapest consumer class wifi router. I know that hotels, conference centers, and all sorts of other places have wifi which doesn’t need to be restarted on a regular basis, that doesn’t suck. Sure some have wifi which sucks, but some don’t. The same goes with companies, at Yahoo! there was good wifi coverage all over campus, their crazy vpn made it hard to use, but the coverage was there. So then my question becomes, what are my options one level up? So far a little searching around i found the Cisco Aironet’s which start around $200 for the lower end models and the ZyXAL’s ZyWALL 2WG router which supports 3G as a backup connection in addition to being a wifi router at $250+. Are those good routers? What are the alternatives in that quality range? Has anybody tried and used either of those? Dear lazyweb, please help…. Posted on July 16th | 4 comments | Filed Under: | read on iPhones in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay So while everybody up north is getting ready for the introduction of the 3G iPhone, it’s also arriving down at the bottom of the world. Apple chose the mexican company, Claro, formerly CTI Movil, to sell iPhones in latin america, probably because they could go with provider and get the whole region. While Claro hasn’t been very clear about exactly how much the iPhone will cost, when it’ll be for sale, or really anything except to say that it’s coming. I do have some information. According to their prices posted for mexico the monthly plans will cost between $45 USD per month and $85 USD per month. The rumors for chile had similar prices. The phone will cost between $450 USD and $0 USD depending on contract, 8gb vs 16gb, etc… Taxes included, which in latin america are substantial, here in Uruguay the IVA sales tax is %21. How many iphones are coming down south? Well i don’t know all the numbers, but Claro’s confirmation page when you request notice about the phones says that they have imported 20,000 phones to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay each. On the surface that seems fare, each country gets a nice shipment. The problem is, Argentina is a MUCH bigger country than the guay’s. Argentina’s population is 40.6 million, Paraguay’s 6.8, and Uruguay’s 3.4. The data i found is from 2006, but Argentina’s cell phone penetration is better than %76. Uruguay’s is %67, and Paraguay’s is %47. So not only did Argentina get fewer phones, they’ve got more people are likely to WANT one. There are 13.5 times more iphones for sale when adjusted for the cellphone ownership market in Uruguay than Argentina! Given that it’s a couple hour ferry ride across the river from Argentina to Uruguay i expect there might be a grey market of Argentines buying their iPhone from Claro Uruguay if Claro Argentina sells out. There have been come claims that Movistar (owned by the spanish telefonica) also will be selling iPhones in latin america, but clearly it’s not at launch, because there’s nothing on their websites about it. I’ll followup when they actually release their prices and say when they will start selling them. Posted on July 10th | 0 comments | Filed Under: | read on The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities I’ve been reading the reddit clone site, Hacker News from ycombinator more lately. It’s got a nice combination of alpha geek tech and small / agile startup topics. While i like the political news on reddit, honestly it’s stopped being very topical for me… to much taken over by link spammers i think who are gaming the system for traffic. The subsites like ruby.reddit.com are still a great source of traffic. What has surprised me is that Hacker News seems to have found me about the same time i found it. When i went to go do a post i thought might be relevant to the community, about moving email from using smtp to xmpp, i posted it on hacker news. Only after did i discover that somebody had already posted a link to it. Then yesterday i did wrote another blog post, this time about leaving yahoo brickhouse, and again over half the traffic came from another link posted to hacker news. So what’s going on here? Well first the community of folks has shifted. It’s previous semi-private places have been lost and new places created. For me long ago i read slashdot, then kuro5hin, then my delicious network, then , then Hacker News. There were others in there too, i get lots of links from reading topical blogs like rubyinside, activist news from indymedia, etc… The shift of online communities resembles urban development and the gentrification of many hip neighborhoods. The artists and hackers move in first, they are in development parlance, risk tolerant. For urban neighborhoods that means they’ll deal with crime if they can get cool warehouses to take over. Then slowly the neighborhood transforms, and gets some nice cafes and clubs, gets known as the place where the hip kids play, and more people come. Rent gets driven up, the crowds come, it becomes to crowded, and the hipsters have to move on. Just replace hipsters with alpha geeks and you get the same process. We are creating virtual communities and then by our very own actions gentrifying them! So why do i like the small sites, not just hacker news, but dzone, rubyflow and a bunch of others? Well for one because they work well for me. I can submit a link, or in the case of hacker news, somebody else in the community links to my stuff, and then i get traffic. A lot of traffic really, I can get 7 votes, but that translates in to 300 to 3000 visits to the article. It’s much harder to get on the front page of reddit, or dare say digg where the true unwashed masses of tech news junkies hang out these days. It’s even harder to get on top of yahoo buzz, where a few hours on the top page can lead to millions of page views. Are we doomed to keep creating these communities, enjoying them for a while, then having to abandon them and move on? When i helped start indymedia.org back in 1999, we thought open publishing, the ability to put on the internet your own articles, videos, pictures about news was revolutionary. It was a big deal, this was before you could just create a blogspot or wordpress site. Our enemy was CNN the site which only showed you the news they wanted… But today cnn has Unedited. Unfiltered. News. iReport.com which is pretty damned similar to what we were doing with indymedia. Then then take some of the news created on ireport and integrate it to cnn.com’s site and use it in the news. The BBC does something similar. The point is, we won. We took an idea, which said that the masses should be able to make their own media, and we did it as an example and eventually the people we were fighting against started copying us. No we didn’t win all of what we wanted, we had a political agenda which we able to advance here and there, we stopped the WTO round, ended the FTAA (free trade area of the americas), but in may ways we won. So what does that mean to online communities, generating and finding news? Well first off it turns out that we, the broader hacker community is doing a good job at coming up with models which change the world. From blogs to wikis to link voting and collaborative editing, we’re coming up with ideas which other people are copying. Or sometimes the hacker community’s tools become mainstream. But we also face the reality that there is a tremendous value in influencing what gets seen. If you can make a website which gets a lot of traffic, there is money to be made there. That’s the attraction of the SEO / SEM world. They’re not respected by true hackers, but they are huge, and they come in and destroy communities like reddit. One option is we just keep moving, which is what we’ve been doing. From slashdot to kuro5hin, from digg to reddit from reddit to hacker news.. The other option is we try and build in to our systems anti-SEO / SEM protections. Find ways to use emergent behavior to find real and relevant content without having it be gameable. Twitter stopped spammers by using tinyurl for all links… Delicious did it by making it so my network is people i choose. The link voting sites will have a hard time. Perhaps we’ll just switch sites every 6 months to a year, but there’s got to be a better way. Posted on July 7th | 16 comments | Filed Under: Technology | read on Good Bye To The Purple Mothership: Leaving Yahoo I just realized that i forgot to post anything on my blog about this… woops! I left Yahoo Brickhouse in April. I twittered about it, but wasn’t sure what to say in a blog. While at Yahoo i got to do the architecture work and a lot of the development of Yahoo! Fire Eagle. We launched the first rails app at Yahoo and were the first to release a working OAuth implementation. Working with Brickhouse was amazing, a great group of people who worked incredibly hard to release an amazing product. Working with, or rather for Yahoo, was not so great. It was a constant painful struggle. Maybe at some point i’ll sit down and write about the relationship the reform movement part of yahoo had with the mothership. While i tried to make things better, i’m not sure that improving the quality of a fortune 500 company is really my cup of tea. I have looked at a number of options since leaving Yahoo, and decided to spend some time coding along side the amazing geeks at entp.com. One time at a foocamp i heard somebody say, “find the smartest group of people you can and work with them.” Entp makes Lighthouse a ticket tracking system that rails itself uses, and a few other apps. Moving to a small agile company is a breath of fresh air. Instead of we need to have a meeting about it, my questions get answered with, “sounds good, pdi”. Instead of being told that subversion is on the timeline for 2 years from now, everybody’s using git. In addition to working with entp i’m also doing some work as an adviser to mapufacture, change.org, and others helping them with scaling, architecture and tech strategy. Posted on July 6th | 0 comments | Filed Under: | read on The Future of Email: From SMTP to XMPP Email is dead! Long live email! Email has long been the killer app of the internet. It has taken us to a world were everybody has an address and anybody can send an email to anybody else. Email works incredibly well. At the same time, email is totally broken. Address books are painful to maintain, and they don’t tell us about somebody’s ability to actually reach another person. Spam is a major problem, i have no easy way of saying who i want to be able to send me messages, no way of saying, i don’t want messages from you any more. Spam, and getting around spam filters with legitimate email is a huge problem. The vast majority of email is spam. There is a reason the myspace/facebook generation hardly use email. They’ve got a system which solves the spam issue, built in is a buddylist which lets you define who can send you messages. It’s also a realtime system rather than a store and forward system expecting users to be mostly offline. The problem is these message systems are walled gardens. Jabber, and it’s XMPP protocol, were built for IM, but they made it super flexible. It can easily be used for email to solve the delivery permission / address book issues. Now i can easily authorize people to send me messages. The addresses are even compatible, so you can have a bridge, attempt to deliver via xmpp and if the domain doesn’t handle xmpp roll back to smtp. Of course i’m far from the first person to have thought of this, it’s come up in 2004, 2006 and 2007. So the question is, why hasn’t it happened. Well first off, these things don’t just happen on their own, somebody has to do the work, write software, organize it, make the change you want to see. How could we get from here to there? Kill email so that email can live free? Well the way i see it there are several things which need to happen. It’s a chicken and egg issue, nobody is sending email via xmpp because nobody can receive email via xmpp, the clients don’t exist. Nobody’s building xmpp email clients because nobody’s sending email via xmpp to receive. There are some things working towards adoption of xmpp for email. Critically, the email address can stay the same. Many of the alpha geeks already use the same address for their email and their jabber IM accounts. The email address is deeply embedded in the culture and any attempt to vary from it would doom the move to email over xmpp. The second thing which can help lead to adoption of xmpp email is the integration of email / messaging and IM. You see it in yahoo mail, facebook, and myspace. The big email / messaging providers are already routing IM messages alongside the email. The third third thing which will help is we don’t actually have to get very many providers to adopt xmpp email to get critical mass. Despite email’s incredibly federated nature, there are a few providers who have hundreds of millions of accounts. Get one, or several of those providers to switch and provide xmpp email support in addition to smtp email, and you’d be able to use that to shift everybody over. The promise of getting out of spam filters will be enough to get the big senders to jump over, and once you’ve got both sides, then it can take years for the rest of the net to move over, it has to be a gradual process. Once you’ve got a big provider who accepts email via xmpp, then you can work on building out library support, create the email extensions to ejabberd, openfire, etc… and bridges to sendmail, exim, postfix, etc.. The obvious people to do this are the google gtalk & gmail teams. They’ve already pushed the idea that my gmail address IS both email and IM. They’ve got the servers running in parallel. It’s simply a matter of building out a test setup, defining how the standard will work, and getting gmail to support it. This is not to say that there aren’t others who could do it. My ex-employer, Yahoo! could do it, but fixing the future of email is probably not a high priority. Microsoft could do it, but they have a hard time adopting open standards and wouldn’t be trusted by the open source developer community who maintain the current technology stack which makes email work. Other than google, the only other player who i could adopting this and pushing it forward is actually AOL. While mostly ignored, AOL has been pretty decent at adopting and pushing new technology and could see this as a way of getting back in to the lead setting trends for the future. While we wait for somebody big to adopt it, building proofs of concept, making a system which will work, would probably push forward the case for replacing smtp with xmpp as our global email delivery system. Posted on June 20th | 14 comments | Filed Under: | read on Speaking about Fire Eagle Last month I spoke about Yahoo! Fire Eagle at the Emerging Communications Conference. Lee did a great job putting together the conference, and had everything recorded. I feel i did an ok job explaining Fire Eagle, but perhaps i had too much coffee to make up for being on the tail end of a dozen straight days of conferences. So if you’re interested in Fire Eagle as it relates to the mobile and telephony world, this is a good talk. The slides are online at slideshare.net. It’s humbling to see a video of yourself speaking. Public speaking is really hard. I’ve been trying to work on my presentations, and i’m getting better over time. Next week i’m going to be speaking at xtech in dublin in a longer talk about Fire Eagle. I’ll get in to the actual api’s and bit about building apps with Fire Eagle. In July i’ll be co-speaking with Kellan about using jabber for web services in Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub at OSCON 2008. In between i’ll be at Google IO and Rails Conf / Caboose Conf, but thankfully i won’t be speaking, unless i get inspired to do a lightning talk. Posted on May 2nd | 1 comment | Filed Under: | read on Funny OLPC Story - How do you delete files? So today i sat in on a meeting with some folks in the Uruguayan government who were trying to get ebook type educational material to laptops of the kids who have them now in uruguay. There are about 200,000 laptops being distributed, and it would cost too much to print books with the material, so they figured these laptop things might be a good way of doing it. In the discussion they told me this little story about tech support and the OLPC or Project Ceibal as it’s called in Uruguay. It seems that during the first trial in the Florida Department of Uruguay they were having a problem. The kids it seems were downloading too much stuff from the internet. The laptops have a 1 gb flash drive, so it’s pretty easy to see how it could fill up. So the teachers told the ceibal folks that this was a problem, the drives were filling up and nobody knows how to delete files. Well this is a problem, so there were meetings, and more meetings, how to delete files, they called up the University of Uruguay’s Engineering Faculty and investigated further. After four months of back and forth they had the answer and somebody traveled up to Florida (the uruguayan florida) with the answers and a training to teach the teachers how to delete files. It was after all what they asked for. When they got there the teachers said, “oh, that! The kids figured out how to delete the files and manage them months ago.” Which is of course the whole point of OLPC, the kids can use the tech, it’s open, hackable, and explorable. Another story is a friend of mine was visiting his cousin and the cousin was excited because he just got one of the laptops. But he said there was a problem, some of the interface was in english. My friend, being a programer, sat down and tried to figure it out. It seems that was some problem with the packages, he’s not exactly sure what’s wrong. But at one point “Save” was translated as “Salvar” instead of “Guardar” Salvar does mean save, but in the kind of way that Jesus Saves. Not the kind of thing you’d do with files, which is Guardar which might literally be translated something more like ‘to put away’ than ‘save’. I asked the OLPC folks about it on irc, and they said that perhaps the build being shipped out in uruguay is out of date with what they currently have released. Clearly they need a good logistics person / team to do release management and handling lots of branched distributions. Not an easy task. On the whole people seem excited about OLPC. It would be good if the Uruguayan government could do something about class size, 1 teacher for 40 students is the REAL education problem, but the laptops help. Posted on April 30th | 1 comment | Filed Under: | read on Search My Projects Testing Rails Indymedia Protest.net Fire Eagle Participatory Society Recently 07.08 Dear Lazyweb: What's a good prosumer soho wifi / router / access point? 07.08 iPhones in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay 07.08 The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities 07.08 Good Bye To The Purple Mothership: Leaving Yahoo 06.08 The Future of Email: From SMTP to XMPP 05.08 Speaking about Fire Eagle 04.08 Funny OLPC Story - How do you delete files? 04.08 Two conversations about tests and software development 04.08 Building flex 3 (flash) swc libraries on mac os x with ant and flex builder 3 03.08 txtmob gets subpoenaed - data retention in the surveillance era 03.08 Fire Eagle talk at the Emerging Communications 2008 Conference 03.08 It's Danger Day, Fire Eagle Flies 02.08 Ruby-Debug (rdebug) Documentation! 02.08 Yahoo?! 01.08 I'm in next.yahoo Categories Home (901) Politics (101) Original (49) Indymedia (162) Protest.Net (15) Technology (108) Travel (54) Español (14) Media (87) Protests & Resistance (58) Social Forums (29) Uruguay (29) ActionDirectory (8) Globalization (42) Ruby and Rails (38) Blogs (23) Voip & Asterisk (8) Podcasting y Odeo (33) My Links protest.net indymedia.org indymedia bloggers anarchoblogs indymedia docs gaba - mi amor blogs i read Testing Rails Book & Blog joyce plath - my mom Powered by Mephisto Valid XHTML Valid CSS syndication with atom / rss |
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