Willy Dobbe - Connectivity Technology

KPN bashing iPhone (je wordt niet groot door anderen te kleineren)

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 08:44:09 +0200

Ik begrijp KPN niet. Ze maken de mooiste reclame campagnes van Nederland, melken het precies ver genoeg uit. Neem bijvoorbeeld de goedemoggel campagne; een hit over heel Nederland!

En toen deze net niet meer kon, werd hij van de buis gehaald. Maar na een paar maanden -precies op tijd- gewoon versie twee:

Ook andere uitingen van KPN zijn altijd goed. Zo rijden er duizenden autos rond van KPN met campagne teksten, hebben ze mooie namen voor diensten ("flexibel") en weet men gewoon al jaren hoe men B2B en B2C marketing moet bedrijven: echte marketeers met verstand!

Wat ik dan niet begrijp is dat er schijnbaar sub afdelingkjes zijn die zelf autonoom wat mogen aankloten in de marge. En dan krijg je dus dit soort advertenties online:

(adwords op Google)

(reclame op Amazon)

en op duizenden andere plekken vond je en week of twee geleden anti reclames tegen KPN, want zo zal de gemiddelde cosument het zien. Negatieve reclames worden geassocieerd met de aanbieder, niet met de concurrent.

De iPhone is een fantastisch apparaat, dat kan je niet afzeiken. Als je dat wel doet, dan plas je tegen de wind in terwijl je probeert te mikken op de digital bohemian. Twee keer dom, toppers moet je niet afzeiken, ze bepalen de maat en opmaat. En tegen de wind in plassen, dat maakt dat je raar gaat ruiken (heb ik me laten vertellen :-) )

Dus KPN, niet huilebalken dat je de geweldige iPhone deal niet hebt gekregen, maar gewoon goede dingen doen.

"You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube" solved

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:09:58 +0200

Somehwo I always manage to screw stuff up. The other day I connected my iPhone to my Mac and it fired up -as it should- iTunes. However, iTunes told me that I should "activate my iPhone or that the SIM was damaged". I have a jailbroken iPhone and a fine SIM card, rebooting the iPhone "solved" the problem. However, it triggered something else that I only found out days later; the Youtube application still was not activated and tol me when I started it

You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube

And then the application stopped. It seems that this is "normal" behaviour when you unlock your phone with ziPhone. However, I jailbroke my iPhone with iNdependence and it has been working fine for month.

The solution for ZiPhone users worked for me as well however. Some say that installing a "YouTube fix" program via the installer application will work, it did not for me. But all you have to do is copy three files to your iPhone, even if you do not know anything about UNIX an easy task.

Just download these threefiles. Start a SFTP client on your machine, copy the files in /var/root/Library/Lockdown to your desktop for backup reasons and copy the three files you downloaded to the same location. The userid to do this with is "root", the password "alpine".

Worked for me, I can use the Youtube application again, thanks to macriot!

OpenSource and clouds

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:47:26 +0200

There are two big trends in ICT; Service a a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). And I do think those two go hand in hand and are reflecting changes that are coming towards the ICT landscape. When I say "hand in hand", I do mean that they are complementary (like people are in a relationship) but also that the are in contrast of each other (like in many relationships). It is my opinion that you either outsource
(parts of your) IT activities, or build the solution yourself. You will either use a cloud to deliver your needs, or make your own cloud. It will either be service from the Microsoft's or you will have to build and manage the solution by yourself. You either well use a cheap commodity service with limited customisation to have the complete freedom to fit the software to your business objectives. Let me try to make clear why this is my opinion and how this influences your role as a user or provider of ICT services.

Recent trends have shown that release cycles of software have become shorter and shorter; to keep ahead of our competitors you have to be able to release early and often.

Release early and release often as a way to be able to quickly add new features for the future, fix problems for the current software and to prevent that software becomes obsolete ("end of life"). The perpetual beta as the new adagium. Where flickr was able to deploy during it's booming period a new codebase every 15 minutes, Microsoft was able to make a new operating 7 years. One is using the "service" (cloud) way of offering it's software, the other is using the "fat client" approach. So on one hand proprietary fat client software s facing competition from cloud based services. Sure Google Docs is not as feature rich or reliable as the Office suite of Microsoft but most agree that this is just a question of time and network reliability; in due time Google Apps will be good enough for the masses. Mind you, most if not all cloud services are proprietary and are doing well; salesforce as the most prominent example.

On the other hand, proprietary software faces problems from the Open Source alternatives. OpenOffice.org is a real competitor for MS-Office, the Ubuntu distribution beats Microsoft in many areas and MySQL is giving the absurd licence fees of Oracle a hard time. If proprietary closed source software wants to stay in business, they have to move. Not to a "long tail" niche but in the other direction, to the left side of the tail where you can offer a highly standardised yet customisable version of their product. That way they are able to release early and often and go for a low margin per product sold but sell a lot. So I do think that closed source software has to move towards a service model, away from the client into the data centre.

This means that the other trend (Open Source Software) -that has written "release early and often" written all over it- will dominate the Do It Yourself area. OSS will be used by people and companies that have time and resources to fulfill their needs via highly customisable software. You will see this first with applications that are by nature webbased; the can move to the cloud with less legacy baggage. Software with much interaction with local legacy products will follow later, much later in some case So Office Automation for existing companies will take some serious time to migrate to the cloud since hybrid solutions (some data local, some in the cloud) will be rather expensive and complex to many from security, identity and manageability point of view.

One of the webbased applications that will dominte the "DIY" will be Drupal. It i already the best Content Mangement System ("looking outside") on the market and it is moving more in the direction of the core of business processes ("looking inside"). Drupal will more and more be used as both a frontend system and a backend system; a system where you can aggregate and enrich data for internal use that can be pushed towards for example an external Drupal site.

If you follow this logic (proprietary moving towards commodity cloud service, Open Source solutions towards customisable client service) you might conclude with me that Open Surce CMS-es have nothing to fear from closed source CMS-es like sharepoint. Sharepoint will be the shell around your office data if you want to use that from a cloud perspective, Drupal will be used by enthusiast and enterprises that need more power and have more resources to kickstart and operate that power.

So some people will use an iPhone and the cloud service "Mobile me", others will build Android. Some will use digital TV solutons from their cable providers, others will build MythTV. Some will run an OpenID service themselves, others will use it from a Google/Yahoo! And some will use voicemail (the most used cloud service in the world) and others prefer a local answering machine. I, I use all kind of differtent services, cloud and local, like most people will do.

PS: This posting as very late for last years' Drupal prediction posting or very early for next year, whatever makes more sense to you

PPS: Sure, you can have Open Source "SaaS" solutions as well, for example hosted and managed Drupal instalations but it will be a niche crossover, if that makes sense to you. Also, when I say "build", it can also mean "let other build", aka buy.

PPPS: I do think that SaaS is a complete wrong term; it is a technological acronym. First, people do not want "Software" as a service, but they want a service (as a service). As long as the ICT things about acronyms like SaaS, true adoption of using a "Service as A Service" will only stall. It is time to stop the technology lingo where it should stop; at the door of the customer and think of services instead of software. Second, Software as a Service is a very limited view on what truly can be accomplished with services; it might be disk capacity from the cloud (like S3, Storage as a Service), it might be CPU capacity (like EC2, CPU as a Service), it might be housing (Rackspace as a Service), hosting (Linux box as a Service) or to give an everyday example we are used to, voicemail (Answeringmachines as a Service). Therefor I plea to stop using the term SaaS and use XaaS ("Anything as a Service") or use SaaS for the acronym "Service as a Service", whatever makes more sense to you.

Drupal Barcode module

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:15:25 +0200

One of the most interesting modules I have seen in a while to come out for Drupal is the mobile codes one. The ability to combine mobile power, location based services and Drupal will open up a complete new field.

Implementations can be to add the barcode in a print.css so people can just point and click to visit the article if they have a printed copy instead of typing in URL's.

But you can also combine the real world with the online (like that is not real) world, with many mobile phones being able to process the image (like my iPhone) you can make "Location Based Services" like shotcode does.

It is available for Drupal 6 only, and to be honest that is a good thing. We always have a "break with yesterday, build tomorrow" attitude and while there are a lot of people still deploying 5 in production right now, in one or two month 5 will be yesterday. And 7 tomorrow...

Boy, the future waits for no-one, this sure goes fast.

Who will be the first to come up with a new way of using this module?"

Teletekst applicatie van e-office voor iPhone

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:25:19 +0200

Hulde voor e-office! Hun teletekst applicatie voor de iPhone is echt geweldig! Snel, mooie userinterface en natuurlijk, teletekst is 100 jaar oud maar met deze applicatie voelt het alsof je op een "mobiele website" zit, hetgeen wellicht meer zegt over de userinterface van de meeste mobiele websites.

Als je een jailbroken iPhone hebt, een must om te instaleren! Voeg http://teletekst.e-office.com/iphone/repo/ toe als repo aan je installer en je bent er. Een nadel, waarom zulke lange URL's als je weet dat je ze moet inkloppen op een iPhone e-office? iphone.e-office.com/repo/ was beter geweest. Maar okay, los van nederlansche gezeik, een geweldigge applicatie!

Drupal as a Home Service Bus (beyond Home Automation)

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:57:14 +0200

If... If I would start my own company... But I won't. I do not have the skills, money, balls and most of all, I am rather happy with my current employer Dutch Open Projects. But if I would start my own company, the services would not be based upon Location Based Services, a carbon copy of free available software or "Social Networking two dot ooo". It would be based upon my hobby in combination with my "vision"

Part of my (IT) related hobby's include Drupal (the best Content Management System), MythTv (the best way to watch less junk TV) and everything Mac related (the best way to communicate with a CPU).

Combining these elements will give you nice opportunities. For example your iPhone could be your remote control for your telly:

(Youtube)

But you could also use your iPhone as a device to watch television on; recorded streaming television based upon your preferences towards your telehone!

(Youtube)

And these are just two simple examples; it could be expanded to controlling and integrating the Squeezebox (cheesy: WiFi to your HiFi) I own and towards all the other electric equipment in my house with X.10 (cheesy: control your house from your mouse) like Mr House does. But you will directly see two problems; all these devices and software packages act like they are the master:

they do not talk to each other
they do not provide a nice consistent user interface

In fact, most of the user interfaces these devices provide are really really bad, if you think Drupal pre4 sucked usability wise, try a MythTV distro from one year a go or even the current version of MrHouse! Now the time might not be right for my "business plan". I know that in the USA the concept of Tivo is rather normal for early adapters but here in the EU harddisk based PVR's are just catching on. It will take some time before the public sees and needs that these devices should be integrated .And by that time I am sure that our friends from RedMond have a very nice "solution" for you; "Vista Home Automation # 1984".

By not combining, not integrating, they do not give the user the option to co-related information about their house. For example, if my central system that my family would not be in the house since there are no blue-tooth telephones detected at 2:00h in the morning while the camera sensors motion, I would like to be paged, see the camera images from my iPhone and when I will not react within a certain amount of time, the system should dial out to the police. Okay, bad example, I do not want that since most likely I forgot my phone or the battery is dead and I am in the kitchen to make some milk for my son to get him to sleep. But you get the idea; a centralised place where information is gathered from multiple sources, co-related and with work-flow, action upon this information.

And by not combining, not integrating, they do not provide the user with a good user interface that is consistent and adapts (context aware) towards the client (text messaging, instant messaging, telephone, full browser etc). A key factor forsuccess beyond the usual geeks.

I would like to be able to solve these two problems, make a central place that talks to all devices and can be "smart" and provide the user with the best UI (s)he can get. Now before you state that there is such a product, I am aware of pluto. Pluto combines music (squeezeboxes), television (MythTV), voice (asterisk) and much more into a central box. See for more information their (nasal!) presentation. But they do not combine it in what I would call a "central smart box". That and the fact that they can use some competition :-)

A central smart box would be able to adapt fast, if there would be an API for a grocery shop, it will be in the software in the box within days, weeks. It would know my spending habits and my income and would swap money to places where it would get the most interest, it would read my RSS feeds and based upon time and location "read" them to me, it would know my agenda and the availability of my friends and it would do so much more that I can think of right now.

And by now, you should see why I would like to add my other hobby; Drupal. I think that a central system that acts upon actions and can do more then that could be a Content management Framework like Drupal. I know that PHP by nature would not be very good for acting as a real time broker between information, but I still would go for a Drupal solution instead of J2EE. Drupal is easier, it adapts way faster, can integrate, has a geeky loving community that probably has some of the devices I mentioned, can look beautiful, has a very small footprint and can be context aware.

I would like coin the phrase Home Service Bus, after the Enterprise Service Bus. More the Home Automation that enables a user to control electronic elements, it would be able to make decisions on its own, based upon input from my actions and the status of electronics devices. It would be a broker of information; it would be a Home Service Bus! Now let's just wait until the Gartner People catch up on this phrase in half a decade :-)

So, if I would start my own company it would be based on building this. But since I will not, you a free to make it. And -lazy as I am- I will buy it from you!

iRetroPhone

Mon, 12 May 2008 11:23:05 +0200

A retro dialer look for you iPhone. Sure it is funny.. For two seconds and then you know why you switched in the early 90-ies.

I wonder if you could do some old skool Phone Phreaking with this. "Alu"Boxing anyone?

Twitter Tip: Follow I want Sandy

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:12:41 +0200

Twitter tip of the day: Make an account on IWantSan.com, a PA that can help you with your agenda, sends iCals, understands BCCed mail with text like: "remember to blog in 4 hours". And that can be followed on twitter so there are extra channels to manage your agenda. See the help page on IWantSandy and follow Sandy on twitter, she is "S" (just one letter). Note: if you have a non US mobile number, Sandy will not help you on twitter. I hope they fix this soon.

Fring on iPhone rules! Hard!

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:43:40 +0200

Fring is a cool service, Fring on the iPhone is below zero kelvin! I just installed it -thanks to mikew41- and Fring is ral real cool. To give you an idea on what it can do

import jabber / gtalk friends and chat with them via Jabber
import friends from other Instant Messaging service and use the service. I do not use these but think MSN, Y!, ICQ etc
setup your twitter account and have a multitasking twitter client in the background (keyword: background)
Import Skype contact, sign in and USE skype over Wifi!
Setup SIP and use your iPhone to make real VOIP calls over wifi over the internet

As you can see, a switch army knife. Skype by itself would have been cool enough for me, SIP a great much needed add on. But this is an application that communicates with all services I use and acts as the information hub between my twitter, my XS4ALL VOIP, my Skype and my jabber friends. I think it it the best application available on the iPhone. Installation is a 10 seconds job once you are in "installer" (you do have a jailbroken phone I hope?). Simpley ad the repository to installer, tab on fring and you are ready! This is great.

BSOD on my MIO navigation

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:16:31 +0200

Some time ago I bought a MIO navigation for my car. In my new job I travel a lot more and visit more customers so having a car navigation was really needed. And due to the heavy traffic in the Netherlands, I really need the traffic jam information as well. So I bought a MIO 230. It is working fine but it is completly aimed at Windows users. I have lots of machines in my home, but no Windows boxes anymore.

So I can not update the information regarding the traffic cameras, that is a Windows only program (and I will not run paralells for just that). And as you can see on this picture, the box itself is running Windows as well, so this semi BSOD was bound to happen; I needed to hard reset the box. I should have bought a real TomTom, at least it is running Linux!

iLinkedin, LinkedIn for the iPhone

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:20:11 +0100

I am a big user of LinkedIn and really like the service they provide and the current new feautures make it an even better platform. Today the announced that there is a mobile version as well of LinkedIn, m.linkedin.com. I think it was not too smart to make a subdomain for this; they could easy check the browseragent in the HTTP headers and use a different site optimzed for your client instead of letting the client go to another address. Having said that, the "m" version looks fine. And even better,

The beta product includes a version specially optimized for the iPhone and is available immediately in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese with additional languages to follow.

A special version for the iPhone that looks and works great! See this video:

Drupal on OLPC, make it happen!

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:54:56 +0100

I wrote about the OLPC before when I wanted you to donate one. But now I am writing to the Drupal community to help ship the OLPC with Drupal on it installed by deafult. If Drupal would be on the OLPC, young users could easy write and share news, videos or photo's with each other. If you care (about Open Source, Drupal and a better world for all), please help us make this happen.

For starters, edit the wiki page on groups.drupal.org/drupal-olpc and add what you will do!

Come on, even if you dont code, you help in many wys here. Write documentation for young people, test a profiler install and dozen of other ways. Doing so will help Drupal, OLPC , yourself by feeling better but most of all, it will help us all to spread information, wellness and access to knowledge better around the world. Help now!

Be sure to read also:
wiki.laptop.org, OLPCnews, developmenseed

UPDATE: I just got a mail from teh devel list from laptop.org saying

Drupal would potentially be very useful on the School Server, which is a
much more appropriate platform. The current prototypes of the school
server are configured to run Moodle. You will have to make a case that
Drupal is a sensible counterpart to Moodle, can be integrated with it,
or should replace it.

I still think having Drupal on an OLPC is good, even if only for having people experiment with the code or use a meshed network distribution where users can post from their own laptop and synchronize to the central school server.

Jan Van Otterlo (KPN Telefoon gids) flest de boel :-)

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:46:19 +0100

RSS readers: zie volledige video op Google Video.

Leuke reclame hoor, van de telefoongids. Over hoe Bekende Nederlandse kijken naar Telefoongids Bekende Nederlanders. Zo'n Jan van Otterlo campagne is natuurlijk redelijk goed bedacht. Maar de duivel is in de details. Kijk maar eens naar de video: op 14 seconde zie je "BB-FP-32" als kenteken van de verhuis auto. En als je die inklopt op vwe dan zie je dat het een ... personenauto is uit '94.

"De echte Jan van Otterlo" heeft er wel last van volgens hyped.nl

Ook leuk? Ik zie als je googled voor Jan Van Otterlo een reclame van aleverhuizers.nl. Goed gedaan jongens!

Waarschijnlijk is het kenteken de Saab van de bedenker van de spot. Wie weet meer van dit kenteken? Of hebben ze zo maar een nummer genomen, gelijk aan de naam Jan van Otterlo? Wie brengt hulp in deze?

AOL corp on Drupal!

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:11:30 +0100

Via Steven Peck, via 21764, the corporate site of AOL is using... Drupal! Note that their developer site has been using Drupal since nearly a year.

I think it is great to see that the big corporations use Drupal, the showcases make it easier to sell Drupal to other corporations, there is more critical mass, more good things will come to and get out of "the community".

Note that there is (or might be) also a dark side. I will blog about the downside soon, but what do you think -apart from the brand AOL- is the downside of corps like AOL using Drupal?

Bert Boerland is moving towards Dutch Open Projects (DOP.nu)

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 20:31:03 +0100

The short story:
I will join Dutch Open Projects, DOP.nu. A 20 person PHP shop that offers SugarCRM, Joomla!, Symphony, Zend … and Drupal in the Netherlands!

The long story:
I started working in 1996 at PinkElephant, a student founded IT company in the Netherlands, hence the name. My first job was as a contractor to help out at one of the Global Network Management Centre’s of AT&T in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I think my first GNU/Linux slackware installs date back from that time. I learned a lot about Unixes, Cisco’s IOS, TCP/IP and managing firewalls. Remember that back in the mid 90-ies, the concept of "firewalls" was still catching on, it was for sure not a widespread best practice. I even remembered a funny trick back then, SGI (for the youngsters, think a hip machine like a Mac) was still a widespread used Unix and running many websites. You could use telnet (yes, unencrypted telnet!) towards such a box and login as the line printer daemon (lpt) that had default no password and a shell! All you had to do was use your favorite search engine, atltavista back in those days, and "google" for "powered by SGI" and you were in.

After my contract at AT&T, I worked internally at Pink’s emerging internet division. However, there was not much internet there, mostly managing Novell boxes. I disliked office automation in general and Novell in particularly so while I liked the young creative people, I went over to UniSource somewhere around 1998. Unisource was part of KPN. KPN just made the shift of a governmental owned telecom provider that had a monopoly on landlines towards a "commercial" company and UniSource was the datacommunication’s department. We managed dial in connections for nearly all ISP’s, managed the backbone of the Internet in the Netherlands. Like all providers UniSource was building a new network and when we rolled the network out, AS21286 was the fastest internetwork cloud in the world, using Packet over Sonnet with 2.5 Gbs per second in the core over Cisco 12016’s. Such a record was in those days beaten in a week, since everybody was rolling out "the new network". While I was in the networking team, the Unix team was only 5 meters away and I learned a lot about for example scaling transparent proxy’s as well.

Around 2000 I rejoined PinkElephant again, now part of Roccade and called PinkRoccade. I designed the new Internet infrastructure for them and was project lead for implementing it. I created a new AS and made the internet connections resilient via BGP4 and two independent upstream providers. After implementing this, my chief was smart enough to make me the manager of the network group and the Unix group. While I started managing the groups existed of only a dozen people, one year later I managed 30 people. During this time, around 2000/2001 I played around with PHPnuke and very soon after I stopped using that spaghetti code, I came across the drop.org website. Ever since that moment, I am more or less "active" in the Drupal community as a non coder. I had several functions after that moment, lead architect for a huge (20k plus seats) Server Based Computing environment, overpaid Business Consultant, speaker and for example active in (pre)sales. And during all these functions, I kept aligned to Drupal but never did anything with it professionally. I tried multiple times to introduce Drupal in my company and some customers. But the timing was wrong and the tool didn’t fit my employer at that time, who is one of the biggest Microsoft implementers in the world.

A year or so ago, I was fed up with my employer. I will not go in to details about why I wanted to leave the company since that would be very unprofessional but two things were most important and I would like to point out. PinkRoccade was bought by Getronics and Getronics lacks any kind of vision; the people in charge are basically there because of a bet gone wrong I presume since they must have been one of the most empty heads I ever met. I like to think / act that all people I meet are smarter then me but that was not the case at all when I spend some time at the headquarters of Getronics. The other reason is that the lack of vision of Getronics shows most when it comes to the IT; they focus completely on Office Automation, the desktop and hence on Microsoft products. In a world that is changing to services instead of clients, de jeure standards in stead of de facto standards and open instead of close, a wrong vision were I don’t want o be part of anymore. Luckily my network (see linkedin is after more then a decade in ICT with lots of contacts with customers and vendors good and –not to brag- I get a call from a headhunter every week or so. So when a small company that is implementing exclusively Open Source solutions came across my path, I decided to go there; I am joining Dutch Open Projects (dop.nu)! Nu btw is "now" in Dutch so it was a popular TLD some years ago in the Netherlands.

DOP is a 20+ person company, specialized in PHP. We do frontend (Joomla!, Drupal), midoffice (Drupal, Zend) and backend (SugarCRM, Symphony) implementations. I will be evangelizing Drupal for customers, working on sales, doing consultancy and leading projects. And hopefully, have a good time.

I always worked for employers with a couple of thousands employees, PinkElephant 1.500, PinkRoccade 10k, Getronics-PinkRoccade 20k and now Getronics-PinkRoccade is part of KPN that has some 30k employees. I am really looking forward to working over at DOP with only 20 people. No more making business plans in powerpoint (we use OO.org and don’t plan that way) but doing and making business in a more agile.

Now –after some 6 or 7 years of helping the community- it will sure be different to make money with Drupal. I hope that I will be able to keep the same independent attitude I had in the past as a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association. Please correct me anytime in the future if you think that I am mixing the community and business, slap me, hit me and correct me. I need you to do that. Ooh, and thanks to all of you who SMS-ed me, send me postcards and mail to congratulate me. I really appreciated that. And I sure will miss my nice colleagues over at Getronics-PinkRoccade, Dr John and Alessio to name two.

I was planning on making a videocast but the amount of post production was too much, kudos to everyone investing so much time in them!