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It must be outage week, since I not only discovered Skype had a brief outage but now MyBlogLog is making my blog load unbearably sloooooooooow. My blog uses the MyBlogLog code to display fellow MyBlogLog users thumbnail pictures on my right nav-bar.

This morning I noticed that trying load a page on my blog on Firefox was giving me an hour glass while trying to look up civrf.yahoo.com. The page was only partially loaded while it tried to load civrf.yahoo.com. At first I was like, what the heck is civrf.yahoo.com? I don't use any yahoo code on my blog. But then I remembered Yahoo! bought MyBlogLog. I looked over at the right-hand side of my blog and noticed some of the thumbnail images of MyBlogLog visitors didn't load, which was a clear indication there was a problem.

Here's a snapshot of the lower-right corner of my browser as I was loading one of my blog's pages. The background should be white, but the page didn't fully load. Note the "Looking up vivrf.yahoo.com" message at the bottom:


I did a DNS lookup of civrf.yahoo.com and nothing was returned. My guess is that someone removed the DNS entry. Maybe as part of the migration process due to the acquisition. Though it was already hosted on Yahoo server. Very strange. In any event, I removed the MyBlogLog code for now. [sigh] MyBlogLog also gives you daily traffic stats. Guess no stats for me today.

I wish browsers, whether it's Firefox, or Internet Explorer or Opera would simply move on and render the next piece of HTML code rather than just get stuck trying to load a piece of Javascript. What's up with that?

Update: 2 min after post
Om points to a major outage at Rackspace, which is Om's hosting company, along with several other large websites. I wonder if Yahoo uses Rackspace - which would explain the MyBlogLog outage.

There is so much hype and hysteria surrounding the Google Phone that I can't keep up with all the various rumors and speculative articles. There's so much to read and so little time. Fortunately, I have a "proxy" to filter through the noise. Rich has a deep interest in the Google Phone so he's been reading up on all the various articles and making brief summaries of what the experts say the Google Phone will and won't be. If you're too busy like me to follow the Google Phone hysteria, here's a few posts Rich made that about sums it up:

Verizon Google Discuss Partnership
Google Negotiates with Sprint-Nextel
Google Phone

My own brief take on the Google Phone is that it most likely will be underwhelming. The problem with the Google Phone is that after the launch of the Apple iPhone, the bar has been set very high. I doubt the Google Phone will have multi-touch technology or any of the UI features that make the iPhone exude awesomeness. Google is a Web and software company trying to break into the already crowded mobile market. Hardware mobile manufacturers are already developing feature-rich mobile phones without Google's assistance, so having Google simply provide software won't cut it. Google needs to do what Apple did and design the hardware as well. And since Google has never been a hardware company, this is uncharted territory for them.

Of course, Google has billions of dollars they can allocate to R&D to develop hardware, so I don't count them out. But sometimes all the money in the world doesn't buy brain power, intellectual property, or patent rights. If it was simply a matter of money, GE with a market cap of $414B  (twice Google's market cap of $216B) would have developed a mobile phone by now. Unfortunately, my prediction is that the Google Phone will exude suckiness making this the first time Google touched something that didn't turn to gold.

Aswath Rao, one of the brightest minds in VoIP points me to a new web application called EnThinnai that offers many of the features of social networks. Aswath was kind enough to invite me to be one of the beta users back in March, but alas, it's one of the many things I'm asked to check out and alas it fell through the cracks. So many things to test, so little time.

In any event, as part of the EnThinnai team, Aswath emailed me recently to tell me that they are allowing the general public to register for the service and it will undergo public testing for a limited period.

Probably the best explanation of EnThinnai comes from here, which also explains the veranda/porch graphic above:

EnThinnai is your front porch on the web where you can store and display information that you can share with your designated buddies. From EnThinnai, you can exchange notes with your buddies, you can share files with them and you can tell them how they can contact you. Also, we will be adding other capabilities incrementally. In many respects, social networking sites offer many, if not all of the features. But in one respect, EnThinnai stands out: on other sites, your buddies have to belong to the network to be your buddy; that is not necessary in EnThinnai. If other social networking sites are like a bazaar or a bar where you meet your buddies, EnThinnai is the veranda in your house where you invite your buddies in. It is in this respect we call EnThinnai to be an un-"social networking" application.

One really cool thing about EnThinnai is that it leverages OpenID for the authentication. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It appears EnThinnai also is leveraging Amazon EC2 and S3 for the storage and running the application. Amazon EC2 and S3 are a great way to host scalable applications with a lot of power and flexibility.

EnThinnai provides a simple way to store and share digital information with your friends and family.
• Share Notes, Files and Contact information
• Individualized permission settings
• Intuitive and straight forward UI design
• Use of OpenID for authentication

Future implementations will allow sharing of other forms of digital information while maintaining the same level of ease of use. A future release will also provide means for other applications to access your data using the recently released OAuth specification.

As soon as I recover from my Disney World vacation and catch up on things, I'll have to check out EnThinnai.

InfoWorld may be in trouble. According to Folio Magazine, "The top editor of IDG’s InfoWorld, Steve Fox, resigned yesterday, becoming the latest in a string of high-profile InfoWorld departures in recent weeks including CEO Bob Ostrow and vice president of online sales Kate Hobbie last month."

Say it ain't so! I love infoWorld. It's one of my favorite tech magazines and I love reading the insightful columns. You can quote me on that InfoWorld if my endorsement will help keep you afloat.

I mean they just ceased print operations, went all digital and now this? If they drop digital as well, I may have to organize a geek protest. For once in my life I will carry a picket sign.

Bah! I was just checking out Technorati at the end of the work day (5:23pm) to see if there was anything interesting going on news wise - and their website just went down. Technorati has been pretty reliable over the years. Hopefully this is just a hiccup and will be a very short outage.

Update:
Very short outage - it was only down for ~3 minutes. Probably a server reboot. Nothing to see here. move along...

Switchvox, a provider of Asterisk-based solutions, has been acquired by Digium, the founding company of the open source Asterisk software solution. This is the second recent acquisition since Digium also recently acquired Astricon. Switchvox, with 1400 Systems Installed and over 66,500 handsets deployed, is an interesting acquisition for Digium. At first I was taken aback by this announcement since Switchvox took the open source Asterisk GPL code and added their own proprietary code. Why would Digium a strong proponent of open source acquire an Asterisk solution with proprietary code? It didn't make sense, but it will become crystal clear in my interview with Digium’s Bill Miller and Mark Spencer.

The first question is why did Digium feel the need to acquire Switchvox?

Bill Miller: The whole concept of making Asterisk easy to use is obviously what has been driving our whole goal. With the Asterisk Appliance we have part of that, but we really do want to own and control the CPE-based solution. And what really what Swithvox brings is what we think is the top GUI out there that is CPE-based. We’re not going to build a hosted environment. We’re not going to build what Fonality has and we clearly don’t like that approach. We believe that this gives us without a doubt the solution that we believe will mass market adoption.”

Will Switchvox keep the company name and product name?

Bill: They’re going to become Digium. For the foreseeable month or two then it will be business as usual because we don’t want to change anything and they’ll continue to offer their products, the SOHO and SMB version. We are working violently on an integration plan that we will announce the product strategy and the details going forward.

So they will keep their name, they’ll be a part of Digium, the product line will still remain Switchvox?

Bill: At least until we get it branded and re-launched as a Digium product with a subscription attached to it.

What happens to Switchvox employees?

Bill: All the employees from Switchvox will remain employees and we will keep the facility in San Diego. It will become the first regional office for Digium and sales office as well on the West Coast.

Knowing that Digium strongly supports open source and calls proprietary or hybrid-open/proprietary solutions “evil” (See Mark Spencer’s IT Expo keynote), I was very interested to hear his response to my next question and that is, “Here’s a tough question for you. So now typically Digium the developers of the Asterisk GPL code, totally open source, what have you. But Switchvox obviously took the Asterisk GPL code but added their own proprietary stuff. You’re not going to take the Switchvox code that they’ve done over the years and add it to the GPL, correct? That’s going to be your secret sauce.”

Mark Spencer: Well actually, the plan is to be able to take technologies that exist today as external things in Switchvox right - so Switchvox much like Fonality was kind of built on the idea of trying to keep the stuff out of Asterisk and put it somewhere else where it could be retained as a traditional and proprietary product. And our goal is to migrate those technologies from you know – try to get stuff that’s today ‘proprietary’ outside of Asterisk into technologies that can live within Asterisk and be open source. So yeah, we definitely intend to try to have some strategy for moving some of those technologies from Switchvox into open source Asterisk.

I replied, “Wow. That’s interesting. So you’re taking the proprietary code that they’ve developed - a lot of the secret sauce that Switchvox wrote and you’re going to help bring that to the open source community. You really are eating your own dog food.”

I recalled Mark Spencer's IT Expo keynote where he espoused the benefits of truly 100% open source solutions and how this contrasted sharply with some of Digium’s competitors such as Fonality. Again, Mark called hybrid-open/proprietary solutions “evil”. I couldn't help but think of Digium vs. Fonality as Superman vs. Bizarro. Who is Bizarro and who is Superman I leave for you to decide. Speaking of Bizarro, the season premiere of Smallville featuring Bizarro will be on tonight (Thursday).

I'm also reminded of Star Trek's Mirror Mirror episode where you there were nearly identical characters from alternate universes - but one set of characters good and one evil. (Though who wasn't rooting for "evil" Spock? Gotta love that goatee!)

Mark Spencer: So as a contrast right, look at what Fonality did. They bought an open source project [trixbox/asterisk@home] and then turned it into a proprietary product. What we are trying to do is go the other way. Take something that started out as a fully proprietary product and to try to leverage that to bring some additional technologies into open source. That's an interesting angle that I don't think anyone has covered.

An interesting angle indeed. Take proprietary code, make it open source, and give it to the Asterisk community. Beautious, I say!

Jack Bauer (aka Kiefer Sutherland) was arrested on a DUI charge earlier this morning in Los Angeles after the police noticed he made an illegal U-turn. He tested over the state's legal blood alcohol limit of .08 percent. C'mon California police, don't you know Jack Bauer is still getting over his drug addiction problem from 24's Season 3 where he went deep undercover and had to use drugs? Cut him some slack, will ya?

Besides, this season Jack moves to New York City, so perhaps he was simply "role playing" as an alcoholic since he will be so far away from his daughter Kim Bauer. Not to mention the stress of saving millions of Americans' lives over the past 6 years. So he threw down a few brewskies, so what?

0.08 percent? Bah! At 0.8 percent, using a simple hand gun, Jack can shoot a gun out of a terrorist's hand 500 yards away without a laser sight. At 0.8 percent blood alcohol level Jack can still stay wide awake for 24 hours and never use the restroom (no matter how many beers he drank.)

As Neal Boortz wrote in his Jack Bauer truths, Jack Bauer was never addicted to heroin. Heroin was addicted to Jack Bauer. Heck, Jack Bauer played Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and won. If Jack really wanted to get away, he could have used his perfect mobile phone device's self-destruct mechanism to disable the police cruiser. Like Neal said, Jack Bauer doesn't miss. If he didn't hit you it's because he was shooting at another terrorist twelve miles away. So perhaps the illegal U-turn Jack made was all part of his master plan to get arrested, get kicked out of CTU, become a rogue agent, and go deep undercover with some terrorist group. Oh wait, that was Season 3.

(note: this post is in jest. I do realize the seriousness of drunk driving and the impact it has on people's lives)

Intel, Microsoft, and other industry leaders have formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group to create a superspeed 4Gbps USB 3.0 standard that can deliver over 10 times the speed of today's USB 2.0 connection. The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second. Others involved in the technology include HP, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated, and will target fast sync-and-go transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments.

Fortunately, USB (Universal Serial Bus) 3.0 will backward-compatible with current USB devices. Targeting over 10x performance increase, the technology will draw from the same architecture of wired USB. In addition, the USB 3.0 specification will be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed to enable backward compatibility as well as future-proofing for optical capabilities.

New USB 3.0 cables with an optical link and a max length of 2-meters will be required to take advantage of the high speed throughput. Wow, fiber optics in the home. Cool! So with this highly touted ludicrous (light) speed, does this spell the death knell for Firewire? In the past, most consumer electronics, especially video camcorders came standard with Firewire. But many have already added USB connectivity. Also, with Apple running on the Intel chipset, USB 3.0 devices should be cross-platform independent between Apple and the Windows operating systems. (and of course Linux). So the need for Firewire becomes redundant.

I should point out that USB already rules the low-to-medium speed device spectrum, including USB-based mice, keyboards, webcams, digital cameras, and a ton of USB gadgets. Heck, most mobile phones I get to test are often charged and sync to a PC via a USB cable. Firewire is pretty much used for high-speed video transfer and external hard drives. But eSATA (external SATA) and USB 2.0 supported external hard drives are eating away at Firewire's market dominance.

Tomorrow, Yahoo! will announce the general availability of the new version of Yahoo! Mail. The new service includes two new major features: free text messaging to mobile phone numbers (available in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines), and integrated instant messaging (IM) with users of Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

According to a Yahoo! representative, the new version of Yahoo! Mail also includes speed and performance enhancements as well as productivity refinements. Yahoo! will continue to offer Yahoo! Mail Classic, its traditional Web mail interface.

The new Yahoo! Mail is faster and more responsive than previous beta versions Search refinements Users can now refine their e-mail search results using advanced search options, including the ability to narrow results by sender, folder, date, attachment type and message status to pinpoint specific queries Shortcuts (U.S. only). Users are now able to right click on underlined dates, names and keywords within messages and take additional action, such as adding events directly to their Yahoo! Calendars, adding friends to their Contacts, immediately viewing a Yahoo! Map of an address, or performing a Web search on a keyword. Also added are six color themes allowing user to personalize the look of their e-mail experience.
 
In addition to integrated text messaging and instant messaging, it features other enhanced capabilities such as tabbed navigation, a reading pane, an integrated calendar and an RSS reader. 

A co-branded version of the new Yahoo! Mail will also be available in the fall to customers using the following broadband Internet services: AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet, Verizon Yahoo! and Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet.  The new Yahoo! Mail will be available this fall to Yahoo! Small Business Mail users as well.

Both the new Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail Classic are free services with unlimited e-mail storage.

Update: Monday 10am - PC World has a nice writeup on the news.

According to InfoWorld, a blogger is blocking Firefox users from visiting his site in protest of the 2nd most popular Firefox plugin called AdBlock Plus, which strips banner advertisements from websites. His rationale is that when you use an advertisement blocker you are stealing.

According to InfoWorld, he stated, "Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing," wrote Danny Carlton, a Web site designer and author, who runs both sites. JackLewis.net is his personal blog site. "Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software," he added in a posting on the Why Firefox is Blocked Web site.

When you go to http://jacklewis.net/weblog/ using Firefox you are redirected to http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/index1.php. I figured he was blocking Firefox simply by the user agent string, which tells the remote web server which browser you are using. Knowing there are several popular plugins to change your Firefox user agent quickly on the fly, I figured this guy must be an idiot for trying to block Firefox users.

I changed my user agent in Firefox to Internet Explorer 7.0's user agent and went back to his page. I was still redirected to the whyfirefoxisblocked.com page. Hmmmm. Interesting - he's not detecting user agent strings to block Firefox. That is the most common way to block a specific browser.

Curious, I did some more digging. I talked with Vahid Hashemian, TMC's webmaster and developer about this.  We looked at the HTML source code and Vahid immediately saw the problem. In his HTML he has this code:

<script>
if(!document.all){window.location='http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/';}
</script>

Internet Explorer and even Opera returns a value for document.all, however Firefox does not. Since the '!' means "not" and Firefox does "not" return a value, it redirects the browser to http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/. So then Vahid and I got to thinking. How could we get past this code? I knew there were plenty of plugins that let you block certain strings of HTML code. So in theory, you could replace this string of HTML with "null". Greasemonkey is one of the most popular Firefox plugins that is very extensible. Using some simple Javascript code in Greasemonkey you can easily strip out this code.

You may wonder why I would go through all that trouble just to access someone's website using Firefox. I guess you could say it's part ego and part fun. He tried to stop me from doing something, so human nature is to find ways around it. It's the challenge of it all. Well, I'm off to read Jack's blog using Firefox - minus all the banner ads. Ahhh, such sweet satisfaction!