Mike Wilks' Blog

I signed up to the BT 12 month contract with a promise of free evening and weekend calls out of apathy as much as anything else. Not that I wanted a 12 month contract nor would I use the free calls. Anyway the last three months BT seem to have rather cheekily charged me my normal line rental plus the cost of this package which is mean to be free. (They have also confusingly changed my billing date to align it with the date they take payment which also creates a bill that is difficult to understand.)

Anyway a quick call later and I have ditched the 12 month contract and gone back to £11.25 line rental only.  The 3 months higher line rental charge was explained as an error in their new billing system where the free calls package for people under contract was actually charged for. They’ve agreed to refund the charges but it does leave a nasty taste. This was clearly a known problem so why did I have to call after it had been incorrectly billed for three months? The whole idea of auto-renewing 12 month contracts is also something that doesn’t feel right (although admittedly they make perfect sense for house insurance etc.)

I would ditch my BT landline in a heartbeat if I didn’t need it for my ADSL connection (from an LLU provider). I have unlimited Skype and more mobile minutes than I need so a landline really is just something that I need to get ADSL rather than a phone.

The release of the new iPhone 3GS seems to have stirred up a hornets’ nest of controversy around the O2 contract and pricing.

The phone itself seems to be a bit of a stopgap release to me. Sure it is faster, has a better camera and has a few new features like a compass but there is nothing game changing. The really good stuff is in the 3.0 OS which will be available to previous iPhones. I can’t help thinking that this is not the must have upgrade that the 3G was from the original iPhone. Personally there is nothing much there to make me want to rush out and upgrade, especially given the O2 “upgrade policy”.

Now I understand that I signed up to an 18 month contract when I upgraded to the 3G but this does appear to be lost on many. That said O2 and Apple had set the precedent by allowing early upgrades to the 3G. The reasoning for allowing the upgrade last time but not this is that the original iPhone was not subsidised. Even accepting all this the O2 position of  having to buy out of your contract seems extreme. If the pricing for buying out of your old contract is really the number of months remaining multiplied by your monthly costs then why would anyone do that? You may as well sign-up to a new contract as it would be the same price and you still get the use of the minutes, texts and data on the old contract and have a new phone. I cannot understand how Apple and O2 didn’t see this storm coming (and maybe they did) – a 12 month product refresh and a contract of a different length was always going to cause problems!

I can’t really get too excited about the whole upgrade fiasco as there is nothing in the new phone I really want – it might be different if there was. What does really annoy me is the tethering charges. As I understand it O2 are going to allow iPhone tethering but will charge a bolt-on of exactly the same price as their 3G data plans. Now I could live with this if they didn’t describe the iPhone data as unlimited. I think I saw the O2 twitter account say that the reason they were charging for tethering is because it uses more data. Now leaving aside the discussion about whether tethering uses more data per se or just allows you to torrent and usenet it is clearly not the case that the iPhone data is unlimited. I cannot understand how the ASA and others have not slapped O2 and every other telecoms provider hard for this whole unlimited farce. Unlimited cannot have a limit by definition and it doesn’t matter whether you call it Fair Use, Acceptable Use, Excessive Usage  or anything else – it is still a limit.

The other thing I find funny about this whole situation is the fact that it makes Pay as You Go look so attractive. I haven’t checked the maths but various people are claiming that Pay as You Go is cheaper then signing a contract with the obvious advantage of not being locked in. If this is true then O2 may not care right not given they are still getting the revenue but they will start to care as soon as their exclusive ends. The fact O2 has an iPhone monopoly in the UK is probably the route of most of these issues and will no doubt be solved when there is some competition. When O2 started to push the 24 month contracts on iPhone so hard I thought it may be a clue to when there exclusive might end but now I am less sure because of the lack of early upgrades. If there were an end to the exclusive in sight I would presume O2 would look to tie in the existing users by extending their contracts by way of upgrade.

Anyway I am just going to wait out my 3G contract and then either continue on a rolling contract or explore jail-breaking and another network.

I’ve been messing about with the new Ubuntu this weekend, so much so I now have:

• The Netbook Remix running on my Acer Aspire One replacing the standard Linpus.

• My Macbook Vmware Fusion Ubuntu upgraded from 8.10.

• An old thinkpad running Ubuntu which was previously dual-booting XP and an old Slackware.

All in all Ubuntu 9.04 is pretty good. I only use Windows in my work machine now and this just vindicates the decision to ditch Windows even more.

I am, however, having an issue getting my VPN to work with the the GUI in both the Ubuntu desktop and Netbook Remix versions. It works fine if I issue the openvpn command and use the same config file which works elsewhere (OSX) but the GUI refuses to work. The build in Network Manager (after I installed the openvpn plugin) accepts the config file import but claims there are “no valid” VPN credentials. KVPNC on the other hand also accepts the config file but hangs on connect. More investigation needed methinks.

Being a Baseball fan who lives in the UK MLB.TV is where I watch most of my games. In the UK we also have ESPN America but they show a minority of Mets games so MLB.TV is important.

In the past I’ve had very little issue with MLB.TV and happily pay the subscription. For live games it seems ok this year but for archived games it is completely broken. The archived games either don’t appear or don’t seem to wotk when they do. I was looking forwards to watching the Mets Reds game from Thursday 9th (despite the Mets loss) but I cannot get it to work. In fact I can only get one game from Thursday to play. There doesn’t seem to be much wrong with my setup as games on Wednesday seem ok.

I really hope they fix this. I watch the majority of Mets games on archive because of the time difference so this is important to me. (Admittedly I missed the day game yesterday because I was at the Cinema!).

It’s the first Mets’ game of the season later today, I thought Spring Training would never end. Really looking forwards to seeing games at Citi Field but we have the Reds and Marlin’s away first.
Today’s is a day game which is great for those of us on the other side of the Atlantic. The game is also televised on ESPN America here in the UK. There are pros and cons to ESPN America, on the one hand you get to see a game on the TV not the laptop but on the downside it will be ESPN not SNY coverage.

Anyway, Let’s go Mets!

It has been a long winter but the start of Spring Training is here and I have to say I have missed baseball. As a UK based Mets fan the only contact with baseball is via the internet or via the newly renamed ESPN American – this is especially hard in the winter. That said the Internet is a  great source of various blogs and forums I just miss out on the New York media, to an extent.

Anyway a handful of games into Spring Training there is good and bad so far. Things will no doubt change after a few more games and it’s slightly different this year because of the World Baseball Classic (WBC) interrupting Spring Training:

Johan Santana - Injury worries are not what any Mets fan wants to see from our Ace and arguably the best pitcher in baseball.

Luis Castillo – coming of a nightmare year when he was clearly hurt he looks a different player now. It’s only been a few games but he looks lighter and much more sharp – long may it continue.

5th starter - So far the job appears to be Livan’s but it is early yet. Garcia was just awful on Friday.

Jerry Manuel - It’s Jerry’s first Spring Training as manager with the Mets and there have clearly been changes from last year. Players seem to be more relaxed but I am not sure anyone is thanking him for the 80 pitch in 6 minute drills.

I have now spend more time looking through the available numbers at various times of day.

There are a few numbers that aren’t there all the time but do appear regularly:

• Beverly Hills numbers (310)
• Washington DC (201)
• Las Vegas (702)
• New York (646, 718)
• In the UK Oxford and Brighton numbers are also available but there aren’t many.
• London (0207 – although there are many more 0208 and 0203)

I have still not seen a 212 or 917 number for New York though and I suspect there aren’t any on Skype. I assume the numbers that appear are people’s Skype Online / SkypeIn numbers expiring and becoming available again so the old ones do get recycled through.

A decent Skype application on the iPhone would be the killer App, bar none. Whilst there is still no official Skype client for the iPhone there are a number of third party applications which have various levels of Skype functionality.
All of the clients out there have two very annoying restrictions which, for me, reduce the proposition of Skype on the iPhone. What’s worse there is nothing even an official iPhone App from Skype can do about them.

1. None of the applications will allow you to make Skype calls over anything other than Wifi. I wonder how much influence the network carriers have had over this apparent Apple imposed restriction.
2. Apps cannot run in the background on the iPhone so even if you are at home or in another place where you have constant wifi you will still miss inbound calls unless you have one of the Apps open at all time. To be honest though if you are at home you may as well have Skype open on your Mac or PC.

The iPhone Skype capable applications I can find include:

• Fring
• IM+ for Skype
• Nimbuzz
• TruPhone

Functionally their coverage is not the same, the table below shows the major differences. IM+ for Skype is not compared here because it works in a different way, described below.

[TABLE=4]

IM+ for Skype is different because it uses a callback model where you enter your mobile number and Skype calls you (at a cost) even for outbound calls. This is the same model as the Skype Mobile Lite products and makes little sense to me. The only use I can see for it is for making international calls where the cost of the Skype mobile call is less than the cost of the international call you want to make. If you are on a subscription then the Skype To Go functionality seems like an easier and cheaper alternative.

Of these clients Truphone seems to have the best call quality, with Fring being very laggy and Nimbuzz being somewhere in between. Right now there is no perfect Skype client for the iPhone, sad but true. I don’t have great hopes for the much hyped (and little officially confirmed) Skype client because of the inherent iPhone restrictions and the fact that their other mobile clients are so restricted.

If you jailbreak your iPhone then things get a little better. There is an application to work around the wifi only restriction as well as one to let you run apps in the background. My iPhone isn’t jailbroken so I am stuck with these restrictions, rumour has it they kill your battery anyway.

Skype has a service where you can rent phone numbers which call your Skype account, nothing new I’d just missed it in the past. Essentially these numbers are normal phone numbers but you can get them in various far flung destinations. This used to be called SkypeIn but is now called Online Number.

Personally I thought there would be loads of information on the web about these numbers, how they worked and what was available but I couldn’t find much. Both Google and Skype’s own forum came up empty so here are a few things I have learned going through this exercise.

Firstly the pricing structure is quite strange. Renting an Online Number costs €50 plus VAT (about £50 including VAT currently) but they are also included in Skype’s monthly subscription plans. In fact the cheapest monthly subscription (unlimited one country calls) at £2.50 (inc VAT) per month includes one of these numbers. The all you can eat international calling plan (£8 a month inc VAT) includes 3. So the learning point here is that you may as well sign up for a subscription if you want one regardless of whether you’ll use the outbound calls or not. This is what I did, I don’t make all that many international calls but it worked out cheaper for me to get a plan rather than just pay for the numbers. You also get Voicemail and a few other features thrown in with the plans.

The second thing I learned is in two halves i) there are various hard to get hold of area codes ii) the numbers Skype offers you changes on a very regular basis. I signed up for the expensive plan because I wanted two numbers, London and New York. The London one was relatively straight-forwards with several 0208 and 0203 numbers available. But when you look a New York things get all together more complicated. Firstly the traditional 212 numbers do not appear to be available even for traditional lines anymore so it seems there is zero chance on Skype. A quick Wiki search found me the list of other New York City Area Codes . Skype seems to offer 347 a lot and 718 sometimes, you just have to check back at different times . The long and short is that I found a 718 number after a few attempts which I was quite happy with, 718 is a NYC Metro Area code covering the boroughs of Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn. As a Mets fan a number with same area code of Citi Field is nice.

That said I really wanted a Manhattan area code number and 646 seems to be the successor to 212. A bit of googling determined that Jet Numbers had 646 numbers for sale for VoIP forwarding  so I figured Skype must have some too.  After a day or so of regular checking I snagged one of these – and regretted jumping on the 718 nuber quite so quickly.I achieved my main aim of a London and Manhattan based inbound Skype number although it would have been good to have used that 3rd number for something else.

In my regular checks I also learned a little about the other types of numbers:

• The prestigious California 310 area code is available but it seems to be pretty rare.
• San Francisco (415) again are available but not very often.
• Washington DC numbers (202) are also on the rare side but I have seen a few.
• I have never seen a Nevada (and hence Las Vegas) number.
• Various countries make you give them additional information or won’t give you a number if you are not a resident. Ireland seemed to be especially restrictive but France and Switzerland also have limits. Hong Kong looked like an interesting option but I don’t know anyone there and I was very suspicious of the additional terms and conditions from the local carrier.

I haven’t really spent too much time using Windows 7 Beta but that time I have spent has been good. My impression so far is pretty much the same as my initial reaction, it is like a cleaner, faster Vista with less clutter.

I guess it is quite an achievement that Windows 7 Beta works well on my MacBook under VMWare Fusion. The only problem I have had with this setup is when I have external screen connected. I can run Vista quite happily when I have another screen attached, either full-screen on the laptop or the external display – but not Windows 7. The Beta gets very upset when there is an external screen attached, especially when you try and change resolution or move Fusion from one screen to the other. The symptoms of this are bluescreens and frozen VMWare.
I can’t imagine I’m going to continue with Windows 7 after the Beta expires but you can never really tell. I have a Vista install that I use for anything that needs Windows and this will probably be enough. That said I have a handful of OSs running in VMWare on my MacBook including various Linuxes.