For as cool as Google Talk could be.. Where are the phones?

You know for all the Skype phones that are pouring into the market, why aren't there more phones for say Google Talk? If you look at their site under accesories all you get is some $250 wireless usb headset. Not exactly what I am after. If they had a (in the range of) $100 handset I would be inclined to buy several and give them to family and friends. You figure, that has got to be cheaper than burning through cellphone plan minutes, I could probably even drop a tier on my plan safely if calls to family where VOIP. Both of our parents have high speed internet,wireless coverage and Gmail accounts because of my efforts. I think it is time to leverage that and reap the benefits of that labor, and the piss poor set of options is not going to cut the mustard.

Listen, I am not a developer, and I don't want to have to roll my own but damn it Google fan boys make me the Jabber phone that I am looking for or I will be forced to wield my soldering iron and total lack of useful knowledge to build my own. Results may not be pretty that is all I am saying. Simple display, you could use the Y-port to simplify the 802.11 part, there has to be some embedded Linux general purpose hardware that you could slap an lcd onto, and plug in a Y-port to, add a linux jabber client and some dialing logic and bam. Google talk phone.

Tags: Google Talk VOIP Convictus

Google Trademark

I was walking to lunch today and overheard someone using the Google as a verb and started thinking about Xerox and what happened when they believed they might loose their trademark for Xerox once everyone was using it as a verb. Right now it seems a little innocuous as when most people say that "Googled" something it means that they used Google to look for something as opposed to a generic search term.

Hold on Google, and pray someone doesn't jump you for returnable results or easy to remember stripped down fast loading accurate searches anytime soon or you may well be facing a similar situation.

For a run down on the history of what I am talking about look Here or Here

Life as a Temp... a Vinette

It's 5:50am on a Saturday and the alarm is going off. The room in black and cold. I finished my drug test and background check yesterday on my lunch break to get this dispatch. By the time i start moving and grab my lunch bag there are only 45 minutes to get to the job site.

Out the door the sky in gray and the clouds are rolling like creme in coffee. The evenings cool has left the windows covered in dew and rain. In side the car food scraps litter the console, passenger seat and floor; the cabin smells of too many drive thru dinners, lunches, and breakfasts. The car now over 100,000 miles starts hard and warms slowly. Idling roughly as it warms the smell of decaying food scraps rises and I promise myself again to clean the car out tonight. Finally the windows are clear enough to see, and in first the again clutch wines and hops out onto the street, makes a right and heads towards the freeway and on towards the job. Only 35 minutes until 8am and check-in

On the freeway, traffic is light and the still warming car growls to 60 and grumbles as it accelerates to 75. Towards the job site following a printed map from Google, praying the directions are accurate. After several wrong turns and missed turns, the car comes shuddering to a halt with 10 minutes until the start of the project. I sit in the smelly, roughly idling car like the other temps waiting for the site manager to arrive. Many are smoking, most are drinking coffee, and some are reading certification books or fantasy novels.

At 8:05 on the clock that is likely too fast, workers emerge from their trucks or cars and seated out of the rain hiding places and congregate near the entrance to the building.

PayPal induced my mouse rage

Once again PayPal was on the fritz. I tried to finish a purchase and this time I was just getting page timeout errors. I believe the specific error was 409, so there is a possibility my internet service provider was the problem. I was not having timeout errors anywhere else, and Speakeasy is really a great ISP so I doubt it. Any how, since the main page wouldn't even come up I was not able to finish my transaction.

Why do we put up with this? eBay has a strict monopoly on who they allow to be affiliates. Take the portable reputation that is free Rapleaf and what happened to them.

To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't even use my papal account but for that it gets accepted nearly everywhere. The same cannot be said for Google Checkout.

Tags: Convictus PayPal

PayPal is broken - the after math

Based on my analytics traffic I am not the only one to receive the "Message 3004" error. I find this especially interesting as I am (at time of post) ranked 10th in the results on Google.com and one of the results that ranks higher than mine actually has a link to the answer. Unfortunately for me, that page would not have loaded when I was experiencing my trouble.

For those who cannot follow that link the summary is below (emphasis mine):

"Account Basics - Logging In - Error Messages

What is Error 3004?

Error 3004 is associated with the slow loading of some web pages on the PayPal website as we periodically upgrade our system to provide members with the best online transaction features available. Some customers may be unable to access the website or complete transactions for short periods of time.

We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your patience."

This is a similar message to the one that I got from my support email to Paypal. Unfortunately it does not well describe my the trouble that I was experiencing. I tried to logon from numerous locations, different computers, and different isp's. I tried on my home DSL connection, on my works DS3 connection and even on a 115kbs cellular data card. The common thread was me, not slow loading pages (though the page did load slowly). Given the low volume of issues that I have found with this (my blog post being so highly ranked being my evidence) it seems to me that some users that are low volume purchasers are being put into some kind of purgatory, and this may be related to the server upgrades it may not be. I have average about 5 Paypal transactions a year. Because of Payperpost.com, I have received funds more than I have sent funds this year.

Paypal really needs to revise their information campaign, and that stinker of a hard to find 800 number needs to be fixed. 1-866-571-3012 (Monday - Saturday 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM, Sunday 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM PT)

On the whole, in a land of few (read about 6) online payment options other than credit card it is sad how PayPal has been allowed to languish. No one seems to want in, or more to the point the eBay/Paypal exclusive partnership makes it hard for any other online payment options to gain credibility.

Tags: Paypal Customer Service Convictus

PayPal is broken -- Update

So,

I cannot determine if my emails to eBay that were forwarded to Paypal helped, or if my unanswered emails to Paypal did it. But I got the following email from Paypal, and magically I can now log in.

"Dear Josh

Notification of Limited Account Access
We are contacting you to remind you that on 14 November our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. Therefore as a preventive measure we have temporary limited your access to sensitive features.

To update, please

Click Here "

I have a suspicion that this is related to my trying to logon about 30 times in a 10 minute period, with all different manner of password. Either way I was never able to get a hold of customer service for anything other than an automated email.

Good thing too, I was able to pay for my item (that I hope to see soon) and will probably start looking to not rely on Paypal.

Google needs to hurry the hell up with their Gbuy service, and make it to the start offering services similar to Paypal so I can take those adsense payments somewhere other than with the Jokers working at Paypal.


Tags: Paypal Customer Service Convictus

Virtualization is going the wrong way.

Virtualization and Cluster computing not doing it for me, NLB and heartbeat failover are just multiple servers taking turns. This goes boost uptime, and parallelize relatively static content (even many dynamic websites are relatively static updating only every few hours). Virtualization is a way to stuff more servers into a data center without having to have more machines; great for testing and Pre-Prod and from a support standpoint really nice, reboots are are unbelievably fast.

I see the value of these services, but I really want is a "virtual-cluster" I think that would be the best description of what I want. I want 1 machine spread across many computers. I want to be able to dynamically add capacity to a "Virtual Machine" by throwing more machines into the pool that are supporting this 1 "Virtual Machine". Keep in mind I don't want this for specific applications. Beowulf and other cluster computing platforms perform this. I am after general purpose computing spread across multiple computers. Think of this as peer-to-peer super computing.

I realize that this is not a likely reality for the moment, but this type of computing will really assist with the real time data intensive applications for our children's children. The types of applications that I see this useful for aren't what we use the idea for now like folding proteins, and checking for cancer results, or any of the other parallelized computing projects out there. In the data center environment, you would only phase out machines to get more power per sq inch. Older but serviceable machines would still have power to give to the grid that is powering what ever app is running on it. If you have a graphic designer, you don't need a $6000 machine for with physics cards, you need 5 $500 machines that could team.

For the basement web developer that accidentally grabs a hold of the long tail and designs a killer app, scaling would be graceful and relatively easy to manage. I realize that the external data bus would have to be fast. Don't we have PCI-E 16x eSATA cards now? isn't that a pretty fast external bus. Two computers could be joined with that as a high speed low latency bus. Two could be used to increase that speed... I am not saying that the software exists to leverage this, but it could. What about diskless heavily interconnected clients sharing an iSCSI target several machines that think like one. I can see how the communication could bet tricky with several machines (more than 3 or 5)and that this connectivity would be a mesh and web, or it could just be a chassis. The real winners in this model would be the blade market. They already are designing machines that share resources (power, and Ethernet) why not extend the metaphor and look for that computational performance gain? Connections between chassis would be much more manageable than between individual rack mounted servers. Right?