iNode: Nota Bene

As part of the new home office setup, I decided to run with a SIP phone service from my wireless ISP rather than any fixed-line installation.

I don't want to be tied to a headset, so a real desk phone was the order of the day. Initial trials with a D-Link DPH-120S were disappointing; there was a nasty audible hum coming through, and the unit felt a little too lightweight in construction.

So off to http://nicegear.co.nz and see what they recommend … a SNOM 300 VoIP phone!

This unit feels much more solid on the desk, and has a nice handset too. There was a little bit of trouble getting it set up with WIC, which needed a full factory reset and reconfigure to fix (it looks like the device breaks the authentication hashes under some circumstances, and just re-entering the account details doesn't fix it). However, if this became a problem in regular usage it would be easy enough to use DHCP/TFTP to provide full automated configuration at boot time anyway.

The web interface is nice and comprehensive, and the phone can be configured with up to four separate SIP accounts; so you can separate between business and personal lines, or between incoming/outgoing calls – just indicate which identity you want to use in the address book for that number. Settings are flexible and well documented – in order to encrypt SIP all I had to do was specify ;transport=tls at the end of the Registrar IP address (RTP was already encrypted, thanks!)

As the phone receives calls and other events happen, you can ask it to hit a URL on one of your own servers. This would nicely form the basis of a “stop the music!” on an incoming call :-) Of course, you can also hand off to a syslog server, or query the phone with SNMP.

So, it's a very flexible device, which makes it easy to fit in with however you want to handle calls. Thanks to Hadley of Nicegear for the recommendation and prompt shipping!

For many years I've been using the excellent Philips SBC RU880 8-in-1 remote controller … although only for three devices at a time, but the learn ability meant that it was always easy to program in a new device.

However, I finally wore out it's abilities with a Panasonic home theatre (SC-PT450 … not multiregion hackable AFAICT, unfortunately); it wasn't able to reproduce the IR signalling. So time for a new remote …

Welcome to the Logitech Harmony 525 (from Dick Smith Electronics, NZ$99). It will run up to 15 devices (now I have 5; TV, Freeview, theatre, multi-region DVD, video), but more usefully it thinks in terms of “activities” rather in devices. This means that I can “watch TV” or “listen to radio”, and the remote will change the state of all the devices to match the goal.

As an example, when I want to watch a non-NZ DVD I need to use my old DVD player; so the remote needs to have three systems switched on, and to set the correct inputs on them all … This takes a long time and uses three separate remotes, but with the Harmony it is one button press …

“When you start this Activity, the remote will ensure your system is set up as follows:”

This isn't “Macro” programming, this is the way the whole device likes to think and operate. It keeps track of the state of all the devices over time, so it knows what operations to use to get things into the requested state. If you do change things with your old remotes (or even manually!) then things will go wrong … at which point you press the ‘Help’ button and it steps through a whole bunch of corrective actions (“Is the TV on? (yes/no); Did that fix it?” etc.)

The biggest downside to the remote is the programming method; a Windows or OSX bit of code that mediates between the USB-connected remote and the Logitech website, where they hold not only a full database of current AV equipment remote control codes, but they also seem to hold your remote control's profile. If I were dedicated I'd sniff the traffic to be sure that's what is happening, but it feels like the case.

Overall, it's a great remote, not just to replace the set of originals, but also to control complex interactions between systems.

So now I've used wubi to install the latest Ubuntu onto my Windows machine. Interestingly easy.

For some reason it won't allow you to set a default user password that has a space in it – but at least it tells you that before you commit the install! Otherwise a peaceful and anonymous install process, that naturally asks for a reboot when it has finished, but politely doesn't demand it.

The second-stage installer carried on happily, but it wasn't immediately obvious that it wanted a reboot, it looked a little like it had crashed. Each real boot takes a long time to get past the swap initialisation stage, but I had the restraint to leave it alone, and it eventually came up into a nice functional Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron system.

With the exception of the mounted disks, we have direct access to hardware, and have to do all the usual things to install Broadcom wireless support, bah. On my laptop there was no Restricted Hardware support required, and compiz worked well. Unfortunately, my acid test is running bzflag, and it's performance was terrible at even medium graphics levels. Perhaps I'll have to hunt down a non-free video driver … :-)

So, that was wubi installing Ubuntu. Now, what did it do within Windows?

At boot time, the Windows selection menu pops up – most of the time Windows users won't see this option. Ubuntu is listed at the bottom, but Windows itself is still the default choice.

C:\ubuntu now exists, taking up just over 8.16GB for the 8GB install of Ubuntu. There are a couple of large .dsk files in there, one for the root volume and one for swap. Under “Add or Remove Programs” there's an entry called “Ubuntu”. There isn't anything under the Programs menu, but hopefully that won't confuse anyone.

Uninstall was very quick, but left the Windows boot menu in place. Not a problem for people who have figured out what dual-boot is in the first place, I guess.

So, pretty straightforward from the Windows perspective. I don't really like dual-boot solutions in general, but this is a good one – simple, straightforward, functional. And none of that dabgerous messing around with partitioning that used to be necessary!

I've downloaded my Ubuntu ISO files … and now I'm sitting on a Windows XP machine I'd like to try the wubi installer to be found on the Desktop CD.

But it's not exactly easy mounting an ISO file under Windows …

Luckily I ran across a blog post from Michael Bowman that discusses a few options :- http://proxy.11a.nu/2005⁄05/08/mounting-iso-image-files-under-windows

There's an ugly-as-but-functioning put of code available from Microsoft, the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP that needs some manual installation. I think I'd rather install crap code from Microsoft than some random third-party all-singing-all-dancing thing to use only one small feature once …

For some reason, the Vodafone Coverage page is really difficult to locate on their site …

And it tells me that my new home, Dunedin, is not very well blessed with 3G … up on Highgate, I'll get “excellent” 2.5G, but no 3G or 3G Broadband. Guess I don't need to get too excited about the new iPhones, then …

A great relief to hear that Vodafone NZ will be supporting the iPhone, I presume after the June release of the 3G/GPS models. Probably a deal related to the Australian situation, where unlocked phones seem to be the only way forward for Apple … and therefore no barrier to adpotion in NZ.

Not that it will make any real difference to early adoptors – we're already using more services from our devices than Apple provide, and therefore we're independant of carrier. And I still want a handset separated from a 12 or 24 month contract …

But imagine the impact on businesses – with ActiveSync in place, the iPhone will start to threaten the rollout of Blackberry services that I have to keep on looking at for the larger customers. All we need is a better set of wireless authentication options (client certificate PEAP for a start) and a decent VPN (although I suppose we could support IPSec with too many tears if we had to). Much cheaper than a couple of BES servers and a deal with data going to Canada …

Most of the world wants to present a single issue and make you comply with their views. The ‘news’ media and of course the advertising industry don't really want you to think for yourself; from the ‘news’ perspective it means that they might actually have to work hard in order to present information, and from the advertising perspective the whole point is to switch off your critical faculties and accept their version of your needs and resources …

Some pressure against these tendancies has been successful, but in general no-one really wants to have to think, because it's difficult. We now have single-sided information presented along with an obvious strawman, called "presenting Both Sides of the issue".

My problem isn't so much the strawman itself, or the trivial representation even it is given; but the insulting oversimplification that there are only two sides to things.

There are an almost infinite different number of “sides” to an issue; multiple viewpoints for every person touched by something. Telling us that there are just “two sides” is more damaging than simply ignoring the alternatives in the first place …