Orient Expression

I have just had an absoulte shock :O Living in Thailand (particularly Bangkok) you get used to the fact that Copyright really means the right to copy stuff and that IP is more likely to mean Internet Protocol (although even that's a leap) rather than Intellectual Property. I have just paid full price for three CD's of Thai artists distributed in Thailand. The distributors are GMM Grammy and More Music . Like a lot of people today I listen to music at work, this generally means MP3. Unlike most people I don't like to be bound to Windows Media Player (the evil empire) and often spend a lot of time on Linux (be it Ubuntu or SuSe ) which don't have Windows Media Player [obviously!]. So imagine my surprise to go through my usual routine of using AudioGrabber to convert my purchases to MP3 so that I can listen at work from my hard drive or play on my MP3 player during the many hours I spend on planes and the less hours that I spend in the gym (more's the pity me) to ...

I am a firm believer in Linux, or at least the idea of Linux. I have used Red Hat at work; I then favoured Ubuntu as an all in desktop with good server support as well. I have now installed SuSe 10.1 on my server at home. All of these platforms have a common flaw, the lack of or at least the general lack of WiFi support. Part of the problem is the slow adoption of WPA-PSK on Linux. Until very recently WEP was the only security (other than MAC address filtering) but this is old and so the move to WPA is essential if Linux is to move up to XP again. Ubuntu Dapper and SuSe 10.1 are very good replacement desktops and I would easily jump across permanently if only we could solve the WiFi issue. With SuSe the D-Link card I have is potentially supportable with Madwifi or Ndiswrapper. I couldn't get either to work at all. Then some more googling later I [finally] discovered that version C of the PCI card was not Atheros but Ralink. A quick trip to the site (via my laptop and trusty U...

or should that be using Web 2.0 to get some action. Damien Mulley has laid it all out in his 11 step guide to "using google to find girls and get laid", you can find it here . Typically the early adopters of new technology has been the porn industry, I have had to mask by country location in Skype as I was getting random connect requests from less than desirables. Damien has a very scary insight on how you can use the array of free tools and move from networking to neckworking the Google way.

Flash memory has been dominated by two things of recent times: Capacity goes up Price goes down We now have a 4Gb SD card, that's the same size as a DVD and how well were they lauded when they arrived? There are prototypes that use magnetic charge (like a traditional hard drive) opposed to the [volatile] electric charge. But what does this really mean? It means that we are very close to having a non moving part PC. The average size of a hard drive in a laptop today is somewhere between 20 and 40 Gb (although this is trending up) so imagine being able to have 10 such SD cards creating a logical drive. This would take up much less space than a normal hard drive and would give the ability to swap out parts of the storage. Think of it as SD raid.

Not long after Nokia announced it's plans to release a non-phone I was keeping my eye on the project. Living in neither the UK or US I haven't been able to buy one yet but a good friend did buy one whilst on a trip in November. I played with it for a bit as was mostly disappointed. The screen is amazingly clear but there was limited functionality and the WiFi connection was clunky and unreliable. Now with the release and installation of Maemo 2.0 the tablet has really come into it's own. The connection is far more reliable and the new range of applications makes it a truly useful piece of hardware rather than just a play thing. The inclusion of Gizmo for 770 is a nice addition and the ability to use GoogleTalk would now give me a full range of communication options. Even when outside the range of a WiFi hot-spot with a suitable phone (something like the E60, which I am still waiting to buy) I can pair it up and use the GPRS connection over a bluetooth bridge to stay conne...

I've been having frequent problems with my ADSL connections recently. I have the same provider both at home and at work. On both connections I get intermittent; seemingly random, outages on the pipe. The service provider has a "help desk" that are typical in Telco environments and IT Companies you know the routine: restart your computer check the cables restart your modem "are you sure you've got the password right? is caps lock on?" Anyway the problem at home was initially a broken modem after 4 months of use and the problem at work was initially a broken splitter after about 2 weeks of use :( Anyway getting to the point (finally), how did I know there was a problem with the network in the first place? not just the usual random web page not available (aka someone's turned the server off) I knew because my trusty network sniffer couldn't find a way out; what is the sniffer I hear you ask? The answer is Skype! Wherever I am, inside or outside of a ...

Or should that be I am mobile, I never was very good at grammar. I have been made aware of Mxit recently. I downloaded it onto my phone to have a play. Mxit is an Instant Messaging platform for small clients, handsets, that connects you to your list of online contacts in your messenger of choice through GPRS or CDMA (3G) networks. The interface is good considering the size of the phone screen and pretty intuitive to use. It could certainly become popular here with some minor tweaking. Localization would be a plus for the app to make it easy for non-English speakers to use the service. One of the things I like about it is the ability it gives me to see across many IM's who is available. I use YIM and MSN and more and more I am using GoogleTalk as me network starts to move into the Googlesphere. In windows world this generally means many IM clients, Mxit acts as a mobile IM aggregator. Agile is also out there but not an option for me as it doesn't support GoogleTalk. The ...

The mighty Om thinks that WiFi location based services will be the next kickstart in the industry. I agree that this could be the killer app, the SMS of WiFi/Max, that could really be a key integration point for Muni nets, FON networks and the newest WiFi enabled handsets. He mentions Loki so I went off to have a quick look. It seems pretty interesting and it made me revisit a previous idea for book readers . Combining LBS with a brand like The Lonely Planet would be a pretty powerful partnership; apply the whole thing in a PDA or some other WiFi enabled device that makes book reading easy (something like Nokia's 770 ) and you have your own tour guide in your pocket that is as close to being smart as you can get. It will be able to know which country you're in and allow you to subscribe to the guide for that country, or mini-guide for that city. Once walking around the LBS granularity would enable a smart book mark to move you to the section of the guide for where you...