So, today, this post comes to you via mobile broadband.

There were some initial glitches though. It took some serious farting around. I tried installing vodafone’s linux software, that didn’t work. It could see the modem most of the time, but it wouldn’t connect. Not sure why, some weird wvdial errors. Yet wvdial on it’s own would work fine.

Then I tried umtsmon. It worked ok. But it’s an ugly little application and it wouldn’t disappear into my system tray. Plus, NetworkManager thought there was no connection, so all my programs thought they were offline. Pain in the ass.

Finally, I upgraded NetworkManager to 0.7. Then bingo, it works like a charm.

I want to keep an eye on bandwidth consumption, so I’m using the Net Monitor screenlet. It’s not quite perfect as it tracks usage by calendar month. But it’ll do as a start.

Ubuntu

Top marks to Ubuntu. You plug in the modem and it “just works”. No farting around switching modes or any of that nonsense. In fact, if you know the init strings, you can just dial and go. Once NetworkManager 0.7 goes final and makes it into Ubuntu, mobile broadband will be a cinch.

Dear Callum

At smile we’re always looking at ways we can improve the service we offer you. This is why we’re pleased to tell you about Faster Payments. The Faster Payments Service will speed up the way you make and receive electronic payments. It means, in most cases, the beneficiary will receive the payment in two hours, instead of the usual three working days it takes currently.

In future you will be able to use the Faster Payments Service to make funds transfers, including, future dated transfers, bill payments and standing orders.

The service will be free - and you don’t need to do anything to benefit. All eligible payments will automatically go via the Faster Payments Service once it becomes available for your account.

The official industry launch happened at the end of May 2008. However the Faster Payments Service is one of the most complex services introduced in recent times and we want to make sure it’s fully functional before making it available to our customers. Along with many other banks we will be conducting a phased introduction over several months, so it may not be available until early next year.

Visit http://www.smile.co.uk/faster for more details.

Yours sincerely,

The smile team

The email was also followed with this rather nonsensical disclaimer:

This e-mail is intended solely for the addressee and is strictly confidential. If you are not the addressee, please do not read, print, re-transmit, store or act in reliance on it or any attachments. Instead please e-mail it back to the sender and delete the message from your computer.

As you’ll notice I chose to ignore that!

It seems like a very simple idea, so I’m sure there’s a good reason why it’s not in popular use. Hopefully somebody can tell me that reason!

Unfortunately, the 5 way navigator button is faulty. The left side of the button doesn’t work, and the right side is super sensetive. So I can scroll right but not left. Bummer. It’ll have to go back to Nokia to be fixed. So much for getting my new machine in a hurry! A good opportunity to practice patience. Plus, it gives me some time to experiment. Once it’s fixed I’ll wipe all the settings and start fresh.

For all you picture lovers, here’s a shot of Mahjong:

This got me thinking, what would I advise Lonely Planet to do? I’ve thought about it a little. Here’s a quick summary.

Core offering

At it’s core, a Lonely Planet guidebook is 2 things. First, it’s a guide. Second, it’s a directory of information.

The guide is the bit that people like Frances make wonderful. The guide inspires you. It motivates you. It captures your imagination. You can fall in love with a place just by reading the guide. The information in the guide stays fairly constant. If a place is charming today, it’ll be charming a year from now.

The directory is indispensable. It’s a list of accommodation, sights, attractions, entertainment for the kids, emergency services, embassies, etc, etc. This information changes almost daily. New businesses open. Old businesses close. Places get better, places get worse. Opening hours change. The book can only hope to be “good enough to be useful”. It can’t possibly be “current”.

I think firstly, Lonely Planet needs to recognise this divide. Then they need to start separating the parts.

User input

Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Mahalo, they all work. They’re all using user feedback in one way or another. It works. Mahalo are trialling a great model. Something similar would work for Lonely Planet. Let readers update the directory. Business owners, bloggers, anyone. Let them all update the directory. Then have Lonely Planet staff check the facts. Anything else would be madness in this day and age.

The fact checking can be done mostly remotely. By telephone, email, or even online. It’s relatively unskilled work, so it’s cheap and easy to outsource. All sorts of smart algorithms could be used to prioritise what gets fact checked first.

So the content in the directory stays fresh, almost live.

Print

Print is what makes Lonely Planet great. You can buy it in a shop and take it with you. No wires, no batteries, no breakages. Split the book into two sections. Firstly, the glossy guide. Full colour, luxurious pages, beautiful photos. Secondly, the directory. Lighter paper, black and white, no photos. Here’s the genius. Make them two separate books. Put the directory inside the guide. In a back pocket. In a separate holder. Whatever.

Then print the guides every year. Every 18 months. As often as the books are currently printed. But, here’s the catch, print the guides every month. Grab whatever’s ready at the deadline, and print it. Mark what’s been verified and what hasn’t, and print anyway. Offer cheap updated directories for existing book owners. Let existing book owners print their own guides online.

Conclusion

Focus on the strengths. Lonely Planet has a great reputation. Let the travel writers focus on being great writers. Let the readers update the directory. Split the book in half. Print-on-demand the directory, pour even more splendour into the guide.

The reality is, if Lonely Planet don’t do it, somebody else will, and they’ll be the next Facebook to Lonely Planet’s MySpace.

• Email, web out and about
• Music, movies, books, on the go
• Skype / SIP calls
• Instant Messaging, IRC
• Meeting notes instead of a laptop
• Instead of a laptop for short trips

Anyone have any feedback? Have you got one? Does it work well? Is the keyboard easy to use? Does the GPS system work well? Do you have to buy the maps? Can they be torrented?

This morning, I thought it would be great to launch a simple site that lists alternatives to popular sites. While walking to the shops, the perfect url hit me, alternatives.to of course! Unfortunately, it’s taken. As is alt.to. However, alts.to is available.

So, questions for you, my faithful readers:

1. Do you think it’s a good idea? Could it be useful?
2. Is alts.to clutching at straws? Should I try to find a url that really works instead of a second best option?

Answers on a postcard, or a comment below for expendiancy!

Update: Both alternates.to and alternate.to are available. Are they better?

Happy Cogs recently did some work on the admin upgrade for WordPress 2.5. Through them, I found the hosting company Media Template. The pitch was appealing. They seemed professional, personal, all the things you’d want from a hosting company. That is, until I started digging.

One of their virtual server products costs $150 per month, and includes 2Tb of bandwidth. Excess bandwidth is charged, per Gb, at $2.56. Or, if you pre-purchase 1Tb, at half that price, $1.28 per Gb. That means that your first 2Tb cost $150, while your next 1Tb would cost $1′310.72, or 17.5 times more than your first 2Tb (1′748% to be precise).

Astounded by this absurdity I contacted their sales team. I was expecting the response to be in line with their website. Intelligent, considered, rational. I was sadly disappointed. It felt like the typical, corporate, monkey follow order, response you’d expect from Hewlett Packard or some other Indian outsourced outfit.

Not content to let matters lie, I have started a campaign. I have described my outrage at GetSatisfaction. Then I posted it to digg. Now I’m posting it here. Then I’m going to email all the links to the CEO and see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an intelligent response. Otherwise, I’ll publicise the fact that their ticket system allows you to view the email addresses of people who contact them.

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of buying qualifications. I opened the email expecting to find a web link, but no, instead there’s a phone number. +1-801-504-2132

They ask you to call and leave a message with your name and phone number. It costs 1.2p per minute to call from Skype. Does anyone have any premium rate numbers? Preferrably the really, really expensive ones? I’ll happily waste some time and money leaving a few messages for them.

It’s quite common to see surfers strolling through the streets of Sydney. In fairness, this was just across the road from the beach though!

The first picture was just across the road from this, Bondi Beach.

Ross, master of the ocean.

The white ladies. This was taken at the Primo Italiano Italian Festival.

While leaving Agata’s place I couldn’t help but laugh at this sign. Otis, the lift company, are located at 5-9 Ricketty Street. Oh dear, that was an unfortunate choice!

I spotted Tunnocks Caramel Wafers in a speciality sweet shop in Pitt St Mall. I just couldn’t resist.

Twitter really has become ubiquitous technology. Everyone’s on it. If only they could come out with a revenue model, make some money, hire some more brains, and sort out their reliability issues. On a plus note, they’re recently blogging about failures or outages, which is nice.

Which begs the question, will I have to buy the book to find out? Is that part of the genius?

Thankfully the remote repo is also available over https. That solved the first problem. I merged, tidied up, and was ready to commit. Then the commit failed because svn was trying to do something fancy with the merge-from repo. I don’t know what or why, but it wouldn’t commit the files. So then I spent hours and hours trying various things. In the end I reverted all the newly created files, then added them back to the working copy, and finally it would commit.

What a pain in the ass.

I’m planning to explore bazaar for all my own version control needs, and if it works well, I’ll switch all our projects over. I’m hoping, like Ubuntu, it just works.

What a shame, Oasis was a great way to get from Europe - Asia - North America. Their 2 routes were major hubs and very useful for the global budget traveller.

Personally, the key quote comes from Jason’s follow up post:

My work *is* my life.

That’s in line with my impression of Jason from this morning’s breakfast. He struck me as the typically edgy, always on the go, workaholic, American entrepreneur. He has that craving that so many entrepreneurs have. I think it’s what drives them to achieve greatness. By contrast, I think it’s also what keeps them from being happy.

I met Jason’s wife at the event. If I’d read all this stuff beforehand I’d have been interested to get her opinion.

Personally, Jason epitomises the type of entrepreneur I don’t want to be. I respect his success and his drive, but it’s definitely not how I want to live. I’m much more in line with 37 signals thinking. In any venture, I’d want people to work as little as possible, while still getting the job done. I value my free time more than the money that any business success might bring. I’ll give the workaholics a wide berth.

I definitely made one or two interesting connections. Karl is an impressive guy. He’s 16 years old and maintains a gaming server network of 628 servers. He and his dad run the business with one other technician. Impressive for 16.

The overall feel was very corporate. A lot of guys in suits. Initially only 1 woman before Zara and Jason’s wife arrived. I wonder if that’s typical of the tech scene in Sydney. I hope it’s a more mixed bag. I’m on the lookout for a few more events to check out.

The effects are awesome. The story itself is great, in a cheesy, comic book sort of way. The acting is acceptable, not quite oscar winning. It’s not 100% predictable, which is nice.

Given that it was $10 Tuesday, I’m glad I made the effort to see it. I’m glad I didn’t take the $31 gold class seats though!

Conclusion: If you’ve got a spare couple of hours or the tickets are cheap, go see it, it’s entertaining and enjoyable.

Overall, the process was rather painless. I’m loving synaptic package management. It really is much better than RPM. The desktop effects are taking a bit of getting used to. I can’t drag / drop windows onto the workspaces, but that’s not too big a deal.

So far, I’m pleased with the switch. For all you visual people, here’s a wee screenshot of the workspace switcher.

Some things that impressed me:

• Media buttons “just work”, I can play / pause / forward / etc music, beautiful.
• Installing copyright “questionable” plugins (MP3s, divx, etc) was painless and granny easy.
• The windows key does stuff, out of the box, not very useful stuff, but still stuff!
• I could import my pidgin, Evolution and something else data from Fedora. Nice.
• Desktop effects are enabled out of the box (compiz for the techies).
• Stuff prompts for configuration during install, for example ddclient. Handy.

I’m pleased I’ve switched over to Ubuntu. I’m a little wary that the #ubuntu channel is quite busy. Ubuntu seems to be popular with new linux users so there seem to be a lot of “newby” questions on there. Good they’re being answered, but it can be a pain for more experienced users.

First thing I noticed, no wireless networks. It detected my card and it seemed to work, but no networks were listed by NetworkManager. I unplugged the power and went through to the living room to plug in with a good old fashioned ethernet cable. Fairly quickly I found a solution. So back to my desk on wireless.

Appearance

At first glance, Ubuntu is just not as pretty as Fedora. The graphics seemed a bit too Windows 3.1 for me. I switched to one of the other included themes. It was a bit better. I think I’d have to hunt around for a nicer Ubuntu theme. Personally, I think this is a big failure for Ubuntu. In aiming to bring free software to everyone, appearance matters.

For a Windows user, comparing Windows Vista with Ubuntu 8.04, I think Vista wins on appearance. For many users, that’s an important factor. Personally, it’s not a deal breaker, but I will do something about it.

Installing software

The package manager in Ubuntu is streets ahead of Fedora. Straight away it just works. It feels nice and clean. It tells you the expected download time until all your packages have downloaded. It strikes a great balance between the fine grained control I get with yumex and the simple interface of the default Fedora package manager. Thumbs up for Ubuntu.

Proprietary formats

Playing MP3 files, avi files, or any other non-free format is a little tricky on Linux. You need to install software which can be “questionable” in terms of it’s copyright position. Fedora gets round this problem by not shipping any of that software. Instead you grab that stuff from livna. However, livna is not installed by default. You have to manually add it yourself.

In Ubuntu, I tried to play an MP3 file. It asked if I’d like to search for the codecs. Then it warned me that I was installing software from the Ubuntu community. A minute or so later, the song started playing. Whatever magic happens behind the scenes in Ubuntu happens automatically. A big plus for Ubuntu, particularly for new users.

Installation

By default, Ubuntu boots in Live CD mode. So no changes are made to your hard drive. It’s a great option for new users. You can test the operating system. Check all your hardware works. Then choose to install if you want to. It was at this point that Ubuntu crashed. I’m not sure what went wrong. I could move the mouse, and the clock was ticking, but nothing else. I tried a ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X, no luck.

Ironically, I was proceeding with the install when it crashed. Now I’ve booted back to Fedora. I’m still swaying on whether to try Fedora 9 or not. If I do go with Fedora 9, I almost certainly won’t switch to Ubuntu. In Ubuntu’s favour, I already have the CD. I’ll have to go to the local library to download Fedora 9. That might end up being the deciding factor!

Conclusion

I recommend Ubuntu to anyone interested in trying Linux. I think they work really hard to make it easy to use, and largely succeed. Personally, being fairly experienced with Linux, I don’t think there will be much difference. Package managing is better in Ubuntu. TrueCrypt ships .debs and not .rpms, so that’s a bonus. I’m just not sure if it will be worth the effort of switching.

For new users, Ubuntu is great. Personally, time will tell.

It took me forever to get my head around it. Eventually, I tracked down where the issue was coming from, and between Ferg and I, we solved it. I’m pretty confident we found the underlying cause of the problem. So I whipped up a patch and headed off to submit it. Again, Zen Cart is not very developer friendly. I had to file a bug report in this forum and then attach my patch.

I think there’s a huge market for an open-source ecommerce platform. Something with the power and flexibility of Zen Cart but simpler to use, install and manage.

A quick explanation for non-techies. Think of an internet connection like a water pipe. You can choose what size of pipe to order. The bigger the pipe, the higher the water pressure. Internet is the same. But as well as the speed / size of your pipe, you also have to think about your total usage. So how many litres of water you pull through the pipe. In internet terms, that’s bandwidth usage.

Typically, in the UK / Europe / US / Canada, you choose your size of pipe, and that’s it. You can run the water almost as much as you like. If you leave all your taps on all the time, the company will complain. But otherwise, you’ll be fine. Not so in Australia. All connections charge you per litre, or in internet terms, per gigabyte. It’s the same in South Africa.

It’s not such a bad deal. The more water (or bandwidth) you use, the more you pay. Seems fair enough.

Australia

You choose your quantity up front. So you might pay for 2Gb or 4Gb or even 40Gb. The pain comes if you should go over your pre-ordered usage. Your pre-ordered bandwidth will cost you anywhere from $2.50 to $10 per Gb depending on how much you buy. Once you go over that, the excess charges are typically described as “15c per Mb”. That’s $150 per Gb.

Your first 6Gb cost $10 each, then use one more by mistake, oops, here’s a bill for $150. Arrrgggghhhhhh.

In South Africa when you run out, your connection shuts off. Then you can call your company and pay for some more. At a little over the regular price. In Australia excess bandwidth costs 15 to 60 times more than standard bandwidth. If I were an Australian citizen I’d campaign to have this type of excess charging banned.

Please be sure to look back at previous questions before posting here. If you’re having a problem where mails are not being sent, or anything of that nature, please post your debugging output. Send a test mail, then copy / paste the response into the comments. Remember to delete any passwords. I’d recommend you replace any @ symbols with something else (at), [at], #at#, etc.

When leaving the first plane from Jo’burg to Abu Dhabi, I left my phone on the plane. I realised as soon as I got to security at gate in Abu Dhabi. I went straight to the Etihad desk where I met Charles. He jumped on the radio and somebody went out to check the plane. No luck, my phone had not been found.

I checked my bags and my pockets again. I re-walked my route. I was convinced my phone had to be on the plane. Charles took me back down to the gate, and had the bus driver check all 5 buses in use on that flight. No sign of my phone.

I consoled myself that it was time to get a new phone, left my email address and contact information with Charles, and boarded my next flight. I was doing my best to focus on non-attachment, the impermanence of all things, and so on. I was just about to fall asleep, when I thought, it would be great if Charles turned up on the plane with my phone. Stop dreaming I told myself, the phone has gone. Not two seconds later, there’s a tap on my shoulder, and Charles is in the aisle of the plane asking me what type of phone it was. Then he handed me my phone. Charles had sent somebody back to double check the plane, and rushed the phone to me just before we departed.

That’s customer service.

Charles could easily have passed the phone onto lost property or left somebody else to deal with it. My phone could so easily have fallen through the cracks. Charles will definitely impact, positively, on my next decision to fly with Etihad Airways. I’ve emailed Etihad to thank Charles.

Update: I’ve released version 0.7 today as well. This version fixes a long-standing bug where the plugin would overwrite the from name and email, even if they had been set by another plugin (or WordPress itself). I recommend everyone update to 0.7 as soon as possible.