The Surgery

Driving home tonight, I was listening to the Victorian Premier John Brumby’s announcement about the preferred tenderers to run Melbourne’s rail and tram networks.

Mr Brumby, and indeed his speech writers, need to understand that the world exists, as indeed the public transport system exists, in three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.  We’ve got considerable freedom when it comes to moving through each of the spatial dimensions, but we’re constrained by time in that, generally speaking, everyone and every thing moves forward.  We can’t, generally speaking, move backwards in time.

Mr Brumby, however, felt it necessary (amidst collaborating with stakeholders and ensuring the availability of multi-modal transport solutions) to reiterate that we are, in fact, going forward.  The transport plan is going forward.  The announcement is about looking forward.   The preferred tenderers are moving forward.  Everything, Mr Brumby assured us, is going forward:

“I can tell you quite emphatically that the performance standards in place going forward are higher performance standards than we have had in the past.”

“They (the new operators) will partner with our government in transforming the network going forward and they represent the best value for money for Victorian taxpayers.”

And when asked about the incumbent operator’s performance: “I don’t think it’s helpful to look back, this is about looking forward.”

Mr Brumby’s comments are reassuring, because those of us who regularly use Melbourne’s public transport system know that it’s been hurtling backwards for some time now.

Here’s a link to the Weasel Words website (essential reading).

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Susan McLean (Cyber Safety Solutions) and Andrew McColm (Evolving Communications) spoke about internet safety and cyber-bullying this afternoon, with Carole Whitelock on ABC Adelaide.

Susan now works in the corporate arena and provides advice and assistance to organisations like schools, sporting bodies, psychologists, child protection agencies and medical practitioners.

Susan on Tech Talk Radio, 23/03/2009

You can download today’s audio segment here.
(Right-click / Save As… to save the file to your computer.  Approx 8MB file size.)

On Tech Talk Radio this week we spoke about the current onslaught of “Commonwealth Bank” hoax emails, requesting or “phishing” for account details or personal information.

Source: Commonwealth Bank

Normally I wouldn”t give these schemes the time of day, but the size of this current campaign bombarding our mail servers is enormous.

The ‘real’ Commonwealth Bank site says:

“The Commonwealth Bank does not send emails requesting you to confirm, update or disclose your confidential banking information.”

Well that sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?

The problem is that unscrupulous spammers are riding the wave of the Commonwealth’s success, registering similar or deceptive domain names and sending hundreds of thousands of spam messages, in an effort to elicit a response from unwary Commonwealth customers.

Messages purporting to be from the following domains have all tried relaying through my mail server in the last 24 hours:

commbiz.commbank.com.au
commonwealths.com
commbank.au.com
bankofthecommonwealth.com
thecommonwealth.org
commbnk.com
commbank.net.au

…and the list goes on.

Fortunately SpamAssassin seems to be knocking them all on the head, by my server at least.

But not all mail servers run real-time anti-spam software, and lots of servers are delivering these messages.

Technology journalist Angus Kidman, writing for APC Magazine, says that the sheer variety of messages means that many anti-spam services are finding it impossible to identify all the problem emails, even if their text sounds familiar and seems easy to detect; also that according to email security vendor MessageLabs (a division of Symantec), in the first week of the campaign more than 22 different core messages were being sent out en masse, with more than 11 variants.

Read the APC article here.

So what can you do to combat the problem?

• Make sure you’re running anti-spam software, and a good email software (like Mozilla Thunderbird, NOT like Microsoft Outlook Express) that detects and quarantines spam;
• DON’T CLICK ON or RESPOND TO spam emails - doing so just verifies to the spammer that your email address is legitimate and active, and invites a thousand-fold increase in spam to your email address;
• Never disclose personal information or credit card details online, unless you’re 100% confident about the security of the website you’re visiting.  Always double-check SSL certificates and the website address in your web browser’s title bar.

If in doubt, don’t click!

Wow.

It’s only taken us six months.

Have a look.

Photo: Robert Broomhead (Monday night's guest)

Google Latitude

In March I blogged about my new HTC Google Phone and was disappointed, at the time, that Latitude wasn’t supported in Google Maps.

Low and behold, the Google Maps on my HTC Dream updated itself a few weeks ago.  Imagine my surprise when I saw a new “Latitude” button in Google Maps!  Hurrah!

I already had Latitude set up through a conventional web browser.  The HTC Dream detected my Google account details and settings, and I could see the location of all my “friends” straight away.  Awesome!  You can set Latitude to manually or automatically update your location, based on GPS latitude/longitude or wireless and telephone networks.  It seems to work well.

Skype Lite Beta

The other exciting development is the addition of Skype Lite Beta to the Australian Android Market.

Users of Android-powered devices can download and install applications from the online Android Market, but Skype is a new addition in Australia and has only just made itself available for download in the last week or so.

I was very excited when Skype Lite Beta finally appeared in my Android Market search results. I was pleased by the quick download and installation; a bit confused that it needed my mobile telephone number at the login screen; but impressed that all my contacts were instantly viewable with my pre-existing Skype account details, and that I could see all my contacts’ statuses (online, offline, busy and so on).

BUT when I made a call to a logged-on Skype contact (not using “Skype Out”), the HTC Dream set up a phone call to a Sydney number.  Huh?  Then I heard ‘ring ring’ and the call was answered at the other end (by my Skype contact, on a Skype client, on her PC in West Melbourne).

We chatted for some time, and the quality was good, but I was a bit confused that my HTC Dream had made a phone call to some type of gateway.  Must be a default setting, I thought, something I can easily change.

But this seems to be by design, and it’s not possible to change.  Read the not-so-fine-print on Skype’s webpage:

“With Skype on your mobile, you’ll always know when your friends are online and you can call them for the cost of a local call (or use your inclusive minutes from your mobile plan).”

And this:

“You can call friends and family from the bus or while you’re sipping a latte in your favorite coffee shop – wherever they are in the world. Best of all, your phone will work as normal – no WiFi or 3G connection needed – and you won’t need to change operator.”

Huh?!?!!  If I’m connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, or an HSDPA telephone network, why can’t I use good old-fashioned “voice-over-IP” Skype to talk to my contacts, and chew-up some of that 3GB on my new data plan?

Then I realised … okay … that’s why Skype Lite Beta needs your mobile telephone number at the login screen.  When the Skype client sets-up a call to the Skype gateway (which BTW is a Sydney indial range, 02 8005 89xx), the Skype server marries your incoming call with your login, and connects your circuit-switched call on the phone network to an outbound Skype call from the Skype data centre.

It also explains how those mysterious “Skype minutes” work on your mobile phone plan.  It’s got nothing to do with bandwidth used for voice traffic, and everything to do with call minutes to and from your local Skype gateway.

Now I’ve looked through all the settings and configuration screens, and I can’t find anything that lets you choose packet-switched calls instead of circuit-switched calls.  Surely the software supports native Skype VoIP?  Well, actually we know that it does, because handsets like these are “WiFi only”.  They’re not mobile phones and can’t “dial-up” a gateway.

The interface is great, call quality is good and the client seems to work quite well.  I just can’t understand why I can’t choose to use packet-switched VoIP Skype, as opposed to dial-up Skype.

Maybe it’s just me. I do get pedantic about these things sometimes.  More testing to be done and more updates soon.

On Saturday I was invited to attend the AGM of the Wireless Institute of Australia in Traralgon, Gippsland.

The WIA is the organisation which represents amateur radio operators to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and purports to be the world’s oldest national radio society, having been founded in 1910!

The WIA AGM “Weekend Of Activities” included conference speakers, informative radio-related technical presentations and off-site activities, like a tour of the Powerworks Energy Technology and Visitors’ Centre.

Yours truly did a short presentation on Social Media and Social Networking on Saturday night.  We had a great evening, the meal was delish and fun was had by all.

Photo: Robert Broomhead

Many thanks to Robert Broomhead for inviting me to attend, and for the terrific audio-visual system which “just worked” with my Asus netbook.

(Audio here: Dr Ron’s diatribe on Social Media and Social Networking at the 2009 WIA AGM.)

Create a “word cloud” from a blog or RSS feed.  This site is awesome!  Check it out:

http://www.wordle.net/

Have you ever watched one of those fancy “webinars” or live video podcasts, and wondered how they broadcast “picture in picture” with different camera angles, or clever switching between cameras, desktop demonstrations and pre-recorded video?

I always thought fancy video switching hardware was required, not to mention some big, big bucks.

But… not so!

I was perusing the Ustream.tv help centre today, and saw a topic which immediately grabbed my eye: “…quickly and easily add scrolling text, logos, RSS feeds, special guests windows, picture in picture, pre-recorded video…”

Woooa, are they serious?  It can’t be that easy, can it?

Yep, it sure is.  Straight away I clicked the link to download WebcamMax for the PC.  This is a nifty utility which gives you significantly more control over your webcam and imaging devices than the default Ustream “broadcast applet”.  My mission was to set-up a “picture in picture” video stream, and it only took a matter of minutes to get this working with WebcamMax.

Setup and installation

Download the 8 MB installer.  Setup is fairly painless and after clicking the “Try” button (you get a 30 day free trial) you’re asked to nominate which applications you want WebcamMax to control video.  I unticked all except UStream.  Then you’re presented with an intuitive GUI which displays any video source that’s currently connected to your PC.  In my case, this was video from a traditional camera, piped through an external USB device like this one.

Next, click on the ‘Sources’ button.  The ‘Main Source’ is your primary video input, and ‘Webcam’ is selected by default.  Look to the right and you’ll see that you can select any other video source simply by clicking the combo box.  Now I’ve also got an in-built webcam in the netbook, which appears as ‘USB video device’.  I switched to that and suddenly I’m looking through the eye of a different camera.  WebcamMax makes it easy to switch between cameras or video sources in this way.

Click the combo to select your main source video device.

You can also click other items in the list, such as:

• ‘Screen’ - live-streams the desktop, by following your mouse pointer or sending the entire screen;
• ‘Movie’ - streams a movie of choice;
• ‘Picture’ - sends a JPG or other image (defaulting to your ‘My Pictures’ folder); and
• ‘Color’ - which lets you set a background colour of any desired shade.

Picture in Picture

But how good is this? Click the button at the bottom of the list control labelled ‘PinP Source 1′.  The same controls appear, duplicated, for a different video source.  Wow!  In no time at all I can display my netbook webcam as a picture inside the main picture.  No expensive video amplifiers or professional switching equipment required!

Picture-in-picture, just like that!

You can get much, much cleverer than this.  Play around with the advanced options and you can move the position of your “picture in picture”, maintain proportions or re-scale, and even have images display as a slide-show.

But wait, there’s more!

I only needed WebcamMax to do “picture in picture”, but it does heaps more than that.  By opening the ‘Effects’ dialogue you can simulate a chroma-key function with different backgrounds.  You can add lighting and shadow effects, grid lines, digital snow, scrolling text… the list goes on.  Select from local or online effects libraries.  There’s even a record feature which lets you write an AVI file to a local disk.

But how does it work with Ustream.tv?

WebcamMax emulates a video device in software.  This means that when you start the Ustream.tv broadcast applet, the WebcamMax “device” will appear in your Video Source drop-down, like this:

The Ustream.tv broadcast applet.  Note the 'Video Source' combo -
just select WebcamMax Capture and you're done.

Simply select WebcamMax as your video device and start broadcasting!

Road test

We’ll put WebcamMax through the hoops over the next few weeks at Tech Talk.  We’ll let you know how it performs, and we’ll listen to your feedback too.  One thing we’re mindful of is not becoming too distracted by the studio webcam; it is, after all, designed to supplement a radio programme, and 99% of our listeners don’t watch the webcam.  We’re hoping to change that, and we hope that using cool utilities like WebcamMax will help us along the way.

Visit the website: http://webcammax.com/

Moving parts.  When it comes to computers, they’re the bane of support personnel the world over.

Why?

Because moving parts fail.  They wear out.  Bearings in cooling fans get hot and seize, heads in hard disks seek and search, read and write for only so long, rubber belts perish and contacts in switches wear down over time.  That’s not to say that components like memory sticks and video cards don’t experience failure, but they’re not subject to the same type of failure that you see in mechanically complex components.

The answer?  Enter the latest phenomenon in personal computing: solid state drives, or “SSD” devices designed to replace old-fashioned hard disks in personal computers.

SSD’s have several advantages over hard disks.  They’re robust, and they’re not susceptible to drops, bumps, dust and environmental factors the same way that hard disks are.  They don’t need the same level of cooling.  And because there is no mechanical delay in reading/writing data, they’re noticeably faster than hard disk drives, especially on a heavily fragmented “disk”.

They are, however, still expensive when compared with traditional hard disks.  The current Wikipedia article on SSD’s suggests that they may be 10 times dearer than hard disks, on a cost per storage unit basis.

The Asus Eee PC 900A Netbook

This is one of the new-model Asus netbooks, designed for easy net access and mobile computing.  It was time to retire my old Acer TravelMate, and I’d been looking around for a replacement for some time.  I had been using an Acer Aspire 1 at Tech Talk for a few months, which has been graciously loaned to me on an ongoing weekly basis by my wife.

The main feature that appealed to me about the Asus Eee PC 900A was the 16 GB SSD.  Now 16 GB might not seem like much, with many personal computers being shipped these days with 320 GB or even 540 GB hard drives.  However, I considered my needs for the Asus: internet access on-the-go; web browsing, email, social networking; and maybe even video-streaming for the TTR webcam.  I don’t need heaps of data storage to do any of these things.  More and more these days I’m relying on online data storage through services like adrive.com, Zoho and Google’s Gmail.

Let me point out that this is not a replacement for my desktop computer, and wouldn’t be suitable for grunty applications like video editing, audio editing, Photoshopping (is that a word?) and other activities that do require plenty of disk space.

First impressions

The Asus Eee PC 900A is small.  It’s certainly much smaller than the boat-anchor TravelMate.  The Asus is equipped with a sharp 8.9″ LCD, a QWERTY keyboard to match and a track pad with a nice feel.  The left / right “mouse buttons” feel a bit plasticky but do the trick.  It has a built-in 300 kilopixel webcam, yep that’s just 0.3 megapixels, which is probably good for Skype video calling, or Yahoo Messenger, and that’s about it.  Actually it sounds worse than it is.

The 0.3 megapixel camera sounds worse than it actually is.

There are also 3 x USB ports, a VGA port, a 100BaseT ethernet port and audio in/out jacks on the left-hand side.  Connection to an 802.11b/g wireless network was quick and easy thanks to the inbuilt Atheros wireless adapter.

Four bright LEDs on the front-right of the Asus show power status, battery status, SSD access and wireless networking status.

What the Asus doesn’t have is Bluetooth connectivity, which may be an issue for some people with Bluetooth peripherals.  It’s not an issue for me however.

Also the Asus doesn’t have a DVD drive or mass-storage interface like a firewire port.  To install software, the current trend with these smaller netbooks is to install “over  the network”, via ethernet or wireless, or use installation packages on a USB memory stick or external hard disk.

Four bright LEDs show power status, battery status, SSD access and wireless networking status.

Performance

The Asus is equipped with an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor.  With 1GB of RAM, and the nice fast 16 GB solid state disk drive, performance is very good.  It feels like a fast notebook, not a sluggish under-perforrming laptop.  The Windows XP operating system is responsive, quick to switch between applications and tasks and quick to start programs.  Booting from cold-start to a usable desktop takes about 30 seconds.  Windows shutdown with no applications running is faster still.

Shipping & Installation

I purchased the Asus from a home-electrical retailer in Melbourne.  It came pre-installed with Windows XP Home edition, pre-validated with Microsoft.  So if I wanted to save my XP Home licence and load an alternative operating system, too bad.  Hmmm.

The installation also shipped with an ASUS edition of Star Office 8, and the latest version of Skype.

Wireless networking was activated out-of-the-box and connected easily to my home wireless network.

The Asus is shipped with a power supply, a protective pouch, cleaning cloth, support CD and the usual Owner’s Manual and warranty information.

Conclusion

I’ve only been using the Asus for a few days.  But so far, I like what I see.

Many technology bloggers (like this one) have been critical of Asus and the seemingly confusing range of netbooks currently on the market.

My opinion is that the Asus Eee PC 900A fills a niche product hole and should sell well.  It’s a fast, light-weight performer utlising modern SSD technology and is ideal for professionals on-the-go.

Once it’s combined with a USB-style mobile broadband adapter on a competitive data plan, the Asus Eee PC 900A will be a useful tool for the modern-day “mobiley connected” professional.

Early January this year, international VoIP-provider Skype announced the release of Skype Lite for Google Android and other Java-enabled phones.

For Android-powered phones like my trusty HTC Dream, all I have to do is connect to the Android Market from my phone, search for Skype, select install, and Bob’s-your-auntie’s-livin’-lover.

This all sounds great, but (*sigh*) Google appears to be maintaining separate Android Markets for Australia and the rest of the world.

Searching the Android Market for “Skype”, “Lite” or “VoIP” reveals diddly-squat.

A media release which appears on many news services and blogs says:

The Android version of Skype Lite will be / is available through the Android Market.

Java-enabled phones, including those from LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, can simply visit www.skype.com/m Skype website.

(Read more.)

Tech Talk Radio host Andrew McColm has Skype Lite working brilliantly on his new Nokia E61, and Hutchison 3 even offers Andrew and me “Skype minutes” on our current phone contracts.

But I’m faced with two problems:

1. International disparity with Google’s Android Market means that Australian users can’t download the application easily, if at all; and
2. Skype are not offering the application via any method other than the Android Market.

Bummer.  Come on Google, Skype, there are plenty of us waiting to chew-through those thousands of Skype minutes on our phone contracts which are currently going to waste.