Archives for 2005

So, in an effort to cut down on my monthly expenses, I discovered that my local and long distance telephone service at a minimum costs me ~$150/mo for my four phone lines, before any per-minute usage charges. Now, since I also have a cell phone (that costs me ~$100/mo), I don’t use my landlines much any more, so this is a great target for savings. But, how?

I’d tried various IP telephony product attempts, several years ago, and wasn’t impressed, so I assumed that all the recent VoIP hype was just some new perfume on top of an old stink. Hoping that this wasn’t just some marketing ploy to turn old crap into new sexy, and realizing that it’s probably been at least three years since I last evaluated IP telephony and a lot must have changed since then, as well as a real need to save some money, I decided to give it a try. Especially since today’s VoIP offerings come in pre-paid, no contract terms, it really lowers the risk factor down to zero. When I’ve got things set up the way I like, I’ll write another blog entry about it, but this entry has a particular purpose, which is …

Help me find the perfect VoIP headset (for my own requirements)!

So, what am I looking for? I want a monaural (not stereo), over-the-ear or on-the-ear headset that is ultra-light, with a voice tube or noise-canceling microphone, with either two 3.5mm jacks to connect to a computer’s headphone and microphone jacks or one 2.5mm jack to connect to a cell phone’s headset jack. If it has two 3.5mm jacks, I’ll need a small adapter that joins to one 2.5mm jack so I can interchange the headset with the cell phone, or if the headset has one 2.5mm jack, I’ll need a splitter that has two 3.5mm jacks so I can interchange the headset with my computers. Bonus if all of these accessories can be had cheaply — say, $30-$40 per set.

The closest I’ve come to finding anything that’s suitable would be either the Plantronics Mirage H41 headset (~$80) or, the Plantronics Mirage H41N noise-canceling headset (~$95). I’d need to use these Plantronics headsets that have some goofy looking connector, I’d need to either get a Plantronics 6in. 2.5mm quick disconnect cord (~$10) and the Plantronics Computer Sound Card Cable (~$30) which similar to the 2.5mm quick disconnect cord except it terminates in two 3.5mm jacks.

So, without searching hard for the Absolute Lowest Price Anywhere!™, it looks like one “set” (headset, jacks) will run between $120-$145, well above the target of $30-$40. To be honest, I almost don’t mind paying the premium if the headset really is worth it. Anyone who has one of these headsets, please leave a comment or email me with your feedback. Please be specific as to what product you’re referring to — include model name and number if possible — thanks!

Tags:
lazyweb,
voip

John Panzer writes in his blog about yesterday’s launch and announcement of AIM Blogs, the free-to-the-web version of AOL Journals for AIM users. All you need is an AIM screen name which you can get by clicking here, then you can go and create your blog.

While I think it’s great that AOL is embracing the free web audience and offering up some quality products, I keep fearing in the back of my mind that this could be deja vu of what AOL did to Usenet by unleashing its millions of members there without any kind of guidance of netiquette, best practices and so on. With the issue of bandwidth “stealing” through hot-linking images and other rich-media assets directly from other people’s websites, imagine what will happen when millions of AIM users start creating blogs and hot-linking images all over their blogs. Or AIM bloggers who just plagiarize other people’s content without providing the appropriate attribution to the sources where the content is quoted from?

Time will tell if the reaction to AIM Blogs is “welcome, new members of the blogosphere!” or “aww crap, there goes the neighborhood.” I’m praying for the former, rather than the latter, but in AOL tradition of just handing products over to the technologically ignorant 50% of the Internet’s users without any guidance or education on how to be good corporate netizens, I fear it’ll be the latter. I hope I’ll be proven wrong.

Esther Schindler recently posted about what can be called “flowerbox indicators” to the Extreme Programming Yahoo! Group:

In a Bank of America ad about their investments in crappy neighborhoods (they didn’t phrase it that way), the speaker said they knew they’d succeeded, “when the flowerboxes begin showing up on front porches.” Teams have the same sort of indirect indications, too, for good or ill.

The notion of indirect indicators and tell-tale signs of a team or project’s direction are nothing new. What I really like is the catchy name, “flowerbox indicator.” Thanks, Esther.

I just discovered that AOL News has a section devoted to blogs called Blog Zone. Smells a lot like MSN‘s Slate Magazine but done on a much smaller scale.

What’s somewhat disappointing is that AOL News: Blog Zone offers no RSS feed! How do you create a product in 2005 about blogging and blogs and not offer an RSS feed? I won’t go so far as to hold Robert Scoble‘s position about firing someone for not having an RSS feed, but it’s pretty embarassing.

Still, it’s a sign of forward progress and hopefully this is just a shallow view of many more improvements that AOL will bring to its free web offering in the months and years to come. Stay tuned …

Back in December 2004, I commented on Paul DeLong‘s LiveJournal about holographic data storage. He even pointed out a company called Litiholo that made an invention I’d been dreaming about, a kind of “instant hologram” film similar to what Polaroids did for the traditional photography field. I envisioned coupling such insta-hologram film with a computer to “print” holograms onto such a film that can later be read with a reader for write-once holographic data storage.

Today, InPhase Technologies published a press release (PDF) announcing that next week they intend to publically demonstrate “the world’s first prototype of a commercial holographic storage device”. Their claim is that “[the] family of InPhase Tapestry holographic drives will have capacities that range to 1.6 terabytes (TB) on a single disk.”

What I found funny were the following two quotes:

The prototype drive records data into InPhase’s patented two-chemistry Tapestry photopolymer write-once material.

From a system perspective, the device presents itself like a drive letter with complete random access, in less than 200 milliseconds, to any file on the holographic disk.

Essentially, the InPhase guys have built yet another WORM (write once, read many) optical drive. Yes, the 1.6 TB capacity is impressive, considering that the only recently has the new Blu-ray DVD-like format made it to market and the proposed dual-layer Blu-ray disks top out at ~50 GB. However, modern 52X CD-ROM drives have a random seek of ~90 milliseconds, significantly faster than the InPhase spec. for their drive. There’s also no mention on how fast or slow the write speeds are for InPhase’s drive, nor the read throughput, but the implication in the press release is that it might be fast enough to retrieve high-definition video data fast enough to broadcast directly from the media, which makes a lot of sense because of the data density of holographic data storage.

Overall, I’m really excited about this release because it means that within the next 5 years, holographic data storage could become the defacto standard replacing today’s traditional optical storage (CD, DVD) at a very reasonable price-point. I can’t wait!

Today, Zoran Vasiljevic confirmed that there is a leak in the threaded Tcl memory allocator [1] (affectionately known as “Zippy” by the AOLserver crowd). I unfortunately already knew about this (see comments) because Qiong Wei told me about it back in December 2004, but didn’t really act on it because I originally thought that it was something in his application code that may have been causing the leak, not something in the Tcl core itself. Today, I verified that it was indeed a leak in the Tcl core, introduced in Tcl 8.4.7 [2].

Here’s my test run against Tcl 8.4.6 (no leak):

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd` ./tclsh
% info patchlevel
8.4.6
% lappend auto_path /usr/lib/tcl8.4; package require Thread
2.6.1
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 8317 12704 1996 ./tclsh
% for {set i 0} {$i < 1000} {incr i} {
    thread::join [thread::create -joinable {}]
}
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 8317 21192 2272 ./tclsh

Here's my test run against Tcl 8.4.7 (has leak):

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd` ./tclsh
% info patchlevel
8.4.7
% lappend auto_path /usr/lib/tcl8.4; package require Thread
2.6.1
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 9358 12692 2000 ./tclsh
% for {set i 0} {$i < 1000} {incr i} {
    thread::join [thread::create -joinable {}]
}
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 9358 48272 29432 ./tclsh

As I said in email to the AOLSERVER mailing list, if you're using Tcl >= 8.4.7, I strongly suggest you roll back to Tcl 8.4.6, and hope that the yet-to-be-released Tcl 8.4.10 contains the necessary fix for this leak issue.