Mobile Broadband via India Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

If you've been following along, you'll know that I currently have one of Three's new HSDPA USB modems on loan for review, and up till now I've been having problems getting it to work under OSX Tiger on my Intel Macbook, although I did get it working under Leopard on my PPC iMac without a hitch.

Well today I had a call from Three's technical support team, and from the sounds of things I was talking to the same Bangalore based team as you'd normally end up talking to if you'd managed to fight your way through the front line call centre people and got a call back from a real technical support person. I was pleasantly surprised, the agent at the end of the phone rapidly ramped their level of technical support from "...and have you tried plugging it into a different USB port?" to talking about the Kernel protection faults and driver conflicts.

The short story is that I now have a working USB modem, and am a happy geek with a new toy. The long story is, well, longer...


Now configured and connected to the Internet
It turns out that I having the configuration problems Aaron Heath was having, but with my own unique spin on things. The initial network driver configuration was indeed failing, because I had turned on the "Require password to unlock each secure system preference" option under the security options in my System Preferences. This meant that Three's proprietary connection software didn't actually have the permissions it needed to add or configure the new network interfaces. We actually accidentally stumbled across this during the tech support call when I plugged the dongle into the laptop while I had the Network Preference pane open and unlocked and it automatically enabled the HUAWEI Mobile device. From there we more or less followed Aaron's walkthrough to manually configure the network interface...


...and it shows up in the normal modem menu
The modem now shows up under the normal Mac drop down for such things, and I can connect to the Internet using it without a hitch from my Intel Macbook using the standard Mac tools. However, and perhaps somewhat tellingly, I still can't use the proprietary Mobile Connect application included with the dongle. It crashes, a bit further forward this time, but still with a Kernel Protection Failure...


The Mobile Connect application still doesn't work though?
Of course this doesn't really bother me, I'd rather use the device using the default tools anyway. However, without the Mobile Connect application, I do need a new way to monitor my bandwidth usage. I might not be paying for my packets while I have the dongle, but I'd like to be able to report back at the end of my trial with how much it would have cost had I actually had to pay for things. Especially since I'm off to Trieste in a couple of weeks and will be using the dongle to roam onto Three's Italian partner network, which could get interesting price wise.

It was surprisingly hard to find a simple, free, application that would just monitor my total bytes up and down on a specific network interface, until I stumbled across the oddly named SurplusMeter, which does exactly what I need, monitor ongoing usage against a preset bandwidth allowance.


Annoyingly there isn't any way of getting rid of the mounted volume on the dongle.
Which leaves me with my final annoyance, every time you plug in the dongle it mounts the partition with the driver software on it. This was actually rather nice the first time I plugged the stick into the computer, but now it just leaves me with an extra mounted volume cluttering up an already over full desktop. I'm not going to muck around with it right now, but after I've tested the dongle, and I'm back from Trieste, I might have a play around with Disk Utility and see if I can stop it doing that and still have access to the modem itself.

Anyway, as it turns out, this post is brought to you via mobile broadband and Three's dongle. I'd forgotten to plug my ethernet cable back into the laptop after taking the screen shots for the post....

Three's dongle and OSX Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Well it's been a week since I received one of Three's new HSDPA USB dongles on loan for review. They're probably regretting sending it to me...


Because this isn't a review, and it doesn't look like I'll be giving one. After a week in my company the dongle is still sitting in its box on the shelf. I still haven't managed to get it to work with my Intel Macbook which, despite claims of support, seems to be due to problems with the connection software and OSX Tiger.

Interestingly I have tried the dongle with my old PowerPC iMac, which is the only machine I have on my desk right now running Leopard, and unlike my laptop, which is still running Tiger, it works without any problems...


On first connection Three's software creates a HUAWEI Mobile network device, and oddly two more unconfigured devices; DIAG and PCUI
Not that my desktop was in need of mobile broadband, but the dongle does connect to the Three network successfully, creating a HUAWEI Mobile network device which, despite my previous complaints, does actually show up in the normal modem drop down menu. So it looks like there is no need to touch the proprietary connection software after your first connection to the network...

Having seen the software actually working now it looks to me as if, under Tiger, the problem is that it's not correctly updating the network devices list the first time it attempts to use the device.

In summary, if you're running OSX Tiger I'd advise steering clear of Three's new mobile broadband dongle because there seems to be some serious software problems. However if you're running OSX Leopard, or Windows come to that, it's likely you'll be okay.

However as I am running Tiger, unless I can resolve the driver problems, I'm pretty much at a dead end. As always of course, you mileage may vary...

Update: From the screen shot it looks like it is possible to get 3's dongle working under Tiger. Milage, as always, does seem to vary...

Update: After manually configuring the network interfaces, the dongle is now working.

KML as a standard? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Google has given up control of the newborn they acquired when they bought Keyhole back in 2004. The Open Geospatial Consortium has just officially accepted KML as a standard.

The upcoming IVOA interop meeting in Trieste next month will also have a KML session, where we're going to discuss KML from the astronomy and VO side. I'd like to think that this is the start of the push to adopt KML as an 'official' standard inside the IVOA. Maybe we can sue for partial custody and it can visit us every second weekend and on major holidays?

The mobile web, still born? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Back in 2005 Russell Beattie said,

If someone's using a PC to demo the next big thing, then it's not the next big thing...

He no long seems to believe that and announced today (via Read/Write Web) that he's calling it quits on his startup Mowser which joins the deadpool today. I'm not surprised. I firmly believe in his statement, but I've always disagreed with his assumption that the next big thing is mobile browsing.

I've argued before that the reason that the iPhone is so successful in the mobile browser market is that it isn't a phone. It isn't competing against the rest of the smart phone market because it's not a phone, it's an internet device, that happens to be able to make phone calls.

When it comes down to it mobile phones aren't about features, they're about ergonomics. That pretty much rules out being able to browse the web, people will make quick dashes, raids, for information. But spending time browsing?

The next big thing isn't going to be on a desktop, desktops are pretty much dead tech except for specialised uses, but the next big thing also isn't going to be the web. The last big thing was the web, it isn't going to be the next thing as well, making it mobile isn't big enough.

The next big thing is ubiquitous computing, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise...

Mobile Broadband? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I was recently offered on loan one of the new HSDPA USB sticks from the UK network operator Three under a similar deal, which is I promise to write about it, to the Skypephone I had on loan from them at the tail end of last year. The stick arrived this morning...


I'm off to the IVOA Interop Meeting in Trieste next month, and Three are one of the few mobile operators with decent roaming rates, at least if you're in a country covered by one of Three's sister networks which are: Austria, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy or Sweden. Which I will be, so it's all rather well timed...


Opening the box you find a USB stick, a cable and a SIM card. You have to insert the SIM card into the stick, and the stick into your laptop. The hardware setup therefore isn't that hard. I'm on a Mac and plugging the stick into my Macbook made the stick mount a partition with the driver software in it, double click to install and theoretically we're good to go...

The initial bad news is that the connection software doesn't use the default OSX utilities. The modem doesn't show up in the normal Internet Connect application, nor does it turn up in the modem status pull-down menu in the menu bar along with my Bluetooth and wired modems. What it does do is tread heavily over my root file system and install various bits and pieces onto the disk. It also installs a proprietary MobileConnect.app into my root Applications folder. Which doesn't make me that happy. None the less we're good to go...


Except that it doesn't work, firing up the proprietary connection software it finds the dongle without a problem, and I appear to have signal. Hitting connect I'm asked for my admin user name (why does it do that?) and then... connection failed.

There are interesting things going on in my system log file, but the application itself doesn't seem to create its own logs so its difficult to tell what's happening. But what seems to happen when you hit connect is that the SetNetworkConfig call crashes due to Kernel protection failure. In other words, bad things happen.

Which is where I am now, I'm about to email technical support with my crash dump and I'll let you know how I get on when they get back to me...

In the mean time you should probably head off and read the interesting BBC News article on why these dongles are so important to Three and why, after initially being a strong supporter of walled gardens, like most people they realised that these are not really a good thing...

Update: Works under Leopard, but not under Tiger?

Update: After manually configuring the network interfaces, the dongle is now working.

Galileo wheeltrack Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Just stumbled across this video, on CrunchGear, of the Galileo wheeltrack demo'd at the Robobusiness 2008 conference which started today in Pittsburgh. It was cool enough that I just had to pass it along...

Google App Engine Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Over the last couple of weeks there have been rumours running around that Google would be launching something to directly compete with Amazon's AWS suite, and embed themselves even further into the Cloud. Sure enough, while I was asleep, Google announced a preview release of Google App Engine at Campfire One.


But what Google has done is take a totally different approach to Amazon. The Google App Engine is basically a platform for producing and deploying (robust and scalable) webservices, where as Amazon's offering is a more pick and mix affair with storage (S3) and compute (EC2) and databases (SimpleDB) being offered as components rather than being integrated into a single platform.

However, one of the reasons why Amazon's S3 storage service has taken off so rapidly is the fact that it can be viewed as a component, and startups (and much larger firms) can use it transparently. So long as you wrap the service sensibly, if Amazon went bust tomorrow (unlikely) or the service became unavailable or unreliable (slightly more likely, but still unlikely) you wouldn't have to rewrite your entire code base. You buy a whole bunch of servers, assuming you can afford it, rewrite the low level library that handles storage, and you're set. You still maintain control.

Google isn't offering as much control as Amazon, if you build your business on Google's platform you're relying on Google to support your business. It's an interesting choice from Google's point of view, and it'll be interesting to see whether people will bet on Google. It looks like a sure bet, but if I was investing a lot of money into a business I must admit that it would probably make me rather nervous to leave so much control in the hands of another company who of course have their own objectives.

It seems very clear that, unlike Amazon's EC2, the App Engine doesn't have the potential (at least in its current incarnation) to be a general computing platform, it seems to be specifically built to be request driven, and that's okay.

Google's choice of Python as its runtime is probably fairly predictable, when you work for Google you have to use one of the four allowed languages, at least for deployable code, those being C++, Java, Python or JavaScript. Of the four Python is the obvious choice...

While I'm not a Python person, my language of choice to get things done is Perl, due to circumstance I've actually had to write a bunch of Python before. So while I'm not a guru, I can get things done in Python, abet slowly, all the while muttering that I'd get it done faster if I was writing in Perl. So I've put myself into the wait list for a slot in the preview release. I'll let you know if get accepted before they open the doors properly, I guess it'll take a while though...


However the release of Google's App Engine does mean that I'm even more annoyed than I already was, which was fairly, that my travel budget won't quite stretch to a trip out to San Francisco for Google I/O. I've already had to shelf plans to head out for Where 2.0 due to the budget squeeze here in the UK, although since I've already been out to ETech this year and will be heading to OSCON in July maybe I shouldn't complain? My a Dopplr trips list is still looking fairly full after all...

Update: There is some good discussion of Google's new App Engine by Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web and by Brady Forrest on the O'Reilly Radar, and TechCrunch have had a go at building and launching an application using the new framework.

Update: Guido van Rossum talking about Google App Engine at it's release via Robert Scoble (and QIK) in two parts...

I'd have loved to have seen Larry Wall doing one of his typical off the wall talks at the launch of Google App Engine with a Perl run time. But I guess you can't have everything...

Update: Show your support for Perl as the next language runtime to be added to the App Engine. Right now (10/Apr) this is the second most highly ranked support request, just behind support for urllib and urllib2 interfaces in Python. Surely we can do better than that?

Update: Well, so much for the lock in arguement (via Daring Fireball and the O'Reilly Radar)

Twittering transient event messages Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After sitting through Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron's talk on Disaster Tech at ETech last month in San Diego, and listening to them talk about Twitter, I finally 'got it'.

The currently supported protocols for VOEvent clients. Roughly divided into the push protocols; vanilla TCP and Jabber, and the pull protocols; RSS and KML. Twitter sits somewhere in between these two classes, as it can be used in both push mode via a mobile device, or in pull mode via the website.

So to go along with the TCP and RSS and KML event feeds, I'd like to point people at the new eSTAR Twitter feed. Right now the feed is only carrying automatically generated tweets alerting you to new transient events such as Gamma Ray Bursts, Microlensing Events and SNe Candidates. But I'm going to be plumbing Twitter into the heart of eSTAR over the next week or so, soon you'll be able to know not only when interesting things are happening, but also what telescopes are responding to those events, and what they're seeing. All in real time...

The April Internet Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Ever year the Internet is choked with April Fools jokes. Paging through my RSS feeds there are some obvious jokes and some less obvious jokes. There are things that might be jokes, but aren't. There are things that at first look might be true, but aren't, and there are some things that it would be handy if they were true. The troubling thing is it's getting hard to tell which is which, and that means that you have to take virtually everything with a pinch of salt. It's bad enough trying to avoid having your office being the one filled with balls (you have no idea how carefully I thought about the Google search to find that image) but every year I basically have to spend the day disbelieving every word people say to me...

...actually thinking about it, why was I trying to avoid having my office filled with balls?