The Cruft Of My Brain

Just stumbled across this post describing why Wave is such a big deal. I think he does an excellent job of describing it, including his follow up post. The idea behind the protocol really is liberating and solves a number of problems. Read it!

Reading about Google Wave today as I wait impatiently for my invite. It better come.

I was reading the latest (I think) developer blog update and near the end is this gem:

“We’re also working on larger changes like providing anonymous read-only access to embedded waves — so anyone in the world will be able to see content of published waves.”

I know this was a “want” for me…but wow…

Once this gets enabled you’ll have a forum software killer.

Build a widget that shows “followers” and Twitter is dead. After all, that’s a large part of Twitter’s success. Showing how big your….follower group is is very important.

Facebook features are just a hop skip and a jump away. You can be sure there will be many developers working on that.

Pretty exciting stuff!

Hoping for a Google Wave invite today. The possibilities for Wave look intriguing, not because of what it’s launching with but rather because of what it’s built on. The core is essentially XMPP from what I’ve been reading, with a healthy dose of HTML5 on top and some other magic happening. Google is framing this as an all in one communications platform. The “modern email”. It needs to get voice support in a hurry. Whether they roll in GTalk or just straight up XMPP voice and video doesn’t really matter. But it needs to be in there.

Desktop sharing needs to be in there. If that happens, GoToMeeting and LogMeIn should really start sweating.

Picasa web albums need to be fully integrated. I’ve seen some references to Picasa being connected but it looks like it might just be the app. That’s a good start but not the whole thing.

I’m also very curious about public vs private waves. Is it possible to have a wave that anyone can have read access to but only some have write? Put that in and you go a long way towards killing forums and maybe even Twitter.

Possibilities…

There’s been a lot of noise lately about AT&T and Apple and Google not playing nice together. The latest is AT&T carrying on about Google Voice blocking rural numbers because their costs are so much higher. Ok, that’s kind of crappy, but it’s just a red herring. AT&T is making a fuss over this because they also see the real potential. What happens when Google Voice links up with the Google Talk service. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wondering why GTalk wasn’t a supported endpoint for GVoice yet. I thought it might be technical but now I have my doubts.

At this point GVoice still relies on the telco’s to provide the actual phone service. If GTalk becomes an endpoint then there’s a much stronger argument for Google being a “carrier” instead of just an “internet service”. That brings all of the issues of access, fees and taxes along with it. Would Google have to start collecting a USF and other similar fees for every GTalk user, even pure IM users, on the basis they “could” use the voice component? Pricey! As far as I know, every other bridge to the PSTN (SIP gateways mostly) has to pay the fees and support universal access.

I think that’s the shot across the bow from AT&T and it’s something Google’s been aware of for a while. And it upsets me greatly.

The world is headed in the direction of more XMPP and SIP, not less. AT&T sees this and probably sees Google as the biggest target to slow this adoption down. AT&T is using the admittedly noble idea of universal communication access to beat down it’s competitor. The FCC should instead be looking at how to address issues like the USF in a world of online focused communications. The trend for land line terminations is only going to increase to the point where only poor people have landlines, subsidized by the USF. Where will those fees come from when everyone is online focused? This isn’t a new thing and it’s obviously been one of the top issues for the FCC.

Perhaps the USF should be added to (more) data lines. Or the Fed Gov can just take it from us with other taxes. They seem to be pretty good at that already.

Most of all, it’s shameful that AT&T is using USF and universal access as a hammer to beat on it’s competitor. Hey AT&T, how about being more competitive and innovative instead? I won’t hold my breath.

Zoneminder, argh. I’m not sure how much time I’ve put into getting Zoneminder to work but it’s a lot. There’s just something about it that confounds me, whether it’s because of the underlying OS or hardware problems…Zoneminder seems to be the typical open source linux app. Very capable, ugly as sin and exceedingly difficult to get working right, unless you are the geek “they” designed it for.

So, I’ve decided to punt. At some point getting something done becomes more important than playing and learning. I bought my PV149 card from BlueCherry some time ago and I check back in with them from time to time. They’ve long had a reference to Blue Iris as a Windows alternative. I’m trying it out and so far it couldn’t be easier to use. I’m a little concerned that it doesn’t handle load as well and is banging on the server pretty hard, but it seems to be getting by ok.

I’ll report back once I’ve played with the motion detection and the alerting system.

Looking for a cheap and reliable way of doing packet capture remotely. I found this reference to using PFSense and it looks like a pretty slick idea. I was quite happy with PFSense when I was using it as a firewall so this idea looks like a winner. I’ll post back if I try it out.

I can’t say I blame them. I’m sure there are some very qualified programmers at Arc that are proud of their product. My experience was less than stellar.

So, here’s what I’ll offer. It seems there might be a new version out. I’ll try a demo copy on a fresh WinXP install if they will provide it to me. I’m not going to drop the $1000+ they ask for this software (there’s another criticism) to see if times have changed. If one of the recent Arc commenters want’s to hook me up with a demo copy though, I’ll test it. I have a clean CCME I can point it at for testing as well.

I’ll post my results, good or bad. If the new version really is so much better I’ll happily post a comment to the original blog entry that seems to have climbed onto the first page at Google. (I’m guessing that’s why this is getting noticed)

So, what do you say Arc? Leave me a comment!

Bennie from Arc found my blog and wrote a couple of comments on this post. I started writing a response but it got a bit lengthy for a comment so I decided to throw it into a new post:

Bennie, thanks for responding. That install was almost half a year ago. Ancient history!

Regarding my comments, I hate Java. Arc Express, Cisco’s ASDM, Cisco’s abomination for router configuration (can’t remember the name now) all use Java and to varying degrees show off what’s horrible about it. My overriding problem with Java is that it breaks User Interface conventions. Or rather, it has it’s own set of them and developers implement them inconsistently. The result is often a mess of a program where users have to struggle with silly things like inconsistent window focus and “enter” not doing anything. It’s 2009, I shouldn’t be forced to click the ok button because someone couldn’t program what the “enter” key should do in a text field.

It’s a whole slew of oddities like this that Arc Express seems to have hit on, all combining for a frustrating experience. Regarding this experience I seem to have purged the whole thing from my memory. You can see from my comments that I had numerous problems with UI elements acting inconsistently.

Do you really want my suggestion? Run away from Java. Drop it like it’s hot. Also, your product has all of the hallmarks of being written by engineers, for engineers. Maybe you’re ok with that but I don’t think that’s the market you’re going for.

Lastly, my memory is a little fuzzy on this but I seem to recall having to jump through some strange hoops to get the license or access to the install guide. I don’t recall exactly what the deal was with that but I remember it being bizarre and frustrating. It’s just an attendant app but somehow it’s like you guys want to build a certified installer ecosystem. Maybe I’m remembering it incorrectly. It’s just an app though. Sorry to burst your bubble but you don’t warrant an entire certified installer ecosystem.

As an alternative, look at Asterisk’s Flash Operator Panel (FOP). This program runs on the server, is included with just about every Asterisk distribution and for the most part just works. Now, I’m not real thrilled about Flash as that has potential to be another rathole like Java. Still, they’ll probably be able to port their app to HTML5 pretty soon.

In a nutshell, don’t “be different” when it comes to UI because the programmer thinks it’s cool. Especially because the programmer thinks it’s cool. That and accept that although you guys have a deal with Cisco, that doesn’t mean you are Cisco.

Sorry, one last thing. The UI I’m referring to here is almost universally the install UI, not the actual attendant console. As I referenced before I think the attendant console is actually ok. Not great but ok. This is one area where you have non-technical end users and they probably would benefit from thinking differently about the UI. One feature I love on my iPhone is conferencing multiple parties together. It’s painfully obvious how it works and it works great!

I’m mystified as to how Cisco.com can go down worldwide for 2+ hours during business hours and there is virtually nothing in the news about it. I managed to find this reference in the Register. Not surprising as the outage hit the UK in the middle of the day. I’ve not found any other comments.

How is it that the king of the networking world, preacher of all things BC/DR, can be down for 2+ hours and no one thinks it’s a big deal.

If nothing else, it sure would be nice to get a root cause analysis from Cisco so we can have a “teaching moment”. If there’s a scenario where arguably the most savvy networking company in the world can suffer a catastrophic failure of a high availability service, we would all be well served to understand the details.

And Cisco’s response about the dangerous power failure at the data center that I tweeted about? I’m not buying that. If that happened then it should have shut down and failed to the DR site. I can’t believe that Cisco has all of Cisco.com in a single data center.

This is like your parents telling you every day not to smoke and then you catch them puffing away one day.

What’s the deal Cisco???

Helped someone figure out a weird problem just now. He would telnet to a router and then telnet back out to a host. He would then try the ctrl-shift-6, x sequence and he would get nothing on the screen. He could type disconnect 1 and get no feedback but as soon as he pressed enter it would show the router prompt and immediately reconnect the session. Seems like it was only listening to the “enter”.

Turns out it was an echo problem. In his Putty settings he had Terminal:Line discipline options set to Force On for both Local Echo and Local line editing. He set these both to Auto and it worked fine after that.

Not sure how that get set but I thought I’d share. A quick google didn’t turn anything up that seemed similar.