Category: Internet

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Easy Webcam Setup with Ustream

A friend who fled New Orleans and Luling, Louisiana showed me his webcast on Ustream. Ustream allows Mac and Windows users to share their video on a Ustream page. Unlike broadcasting a live feed straight from your computer, Ustream can handle thousands of visits, as my friend’s page had before his house lost power when hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana this morning.

Another service like Ustream is Stickam. Both are free so I suppose their business model is to just be purchased by Google.

If you have a webcam and a nice view from your window, give Ustream a try. Or you can just use it to watch emergencies like this.

Best of luck to everyone in the storm.

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Find WiFi networks with iStumbler for Mac OS X

iStumbler allows you to find and determine the strength of WiFi networks. It works only with Macs.

iStumbler is useful when you need access to the internet and need free WiFi. iStumbler will tell you if the network is secure or open. Although connecting to an open WiFi point is of questionable legality, there are some networks from coffee shops and other locations that welcome you.

iStumbler is also useful in setting up wireless networks to see where best to place your access point.

While you can just use the built-in AirPort connection information, iStumbler provides you the signal strength information that might help you.

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Mosso Cloud Computing

Mosso is a very ambitious web hosting solution designed to be infinitely scalable. It accomplishes this by clustering together as many servers as they need to handle their load.  For just $100/month, you get 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth for as many sites as you want.  You can use some of the most popular web development technologies such as PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, .NET, ASP, MySQL, and MS SQL 2005.  Because this is a clustered environment, you lose a few of the pleasantries that a dedicated server gives you such as shell access and root access to the server allowing you to run any processes.  On the other hand, you gain scalability and you don’t have to worry about managing your server.  If Mosso goes down, everyone notices so they address it as soon as possible.  The biggest problem is that it does seem to go down.

Mosso appears to be targeting less mission critical websites such as blogs that can afford to have a little downtime every now and then.  It is slower as far as web pages loading than using a dedicated server but on the other hand, if you grow in visitors, the speed will be the same whereas on a dedicated server, with increased visitors, your server may become overwhelmed.  For non-essential websites, Mosso appears to be a very nice hosting choice.

The most impressive aspect of Mosso is all the technologies they try to support.  Google has a very similar service called Google App Engine.  It only supports python though so it is very limited.  It can’t even support SSL certificates like Mosso can.  Amazon also has a cloud solution called EC2 but it is really only for tech experts.  It does not scale automatically by default like Mosso.  Instead, you have to turn on more servers as you need them.  You can program your Amazon servers to do this themselves but that’s part of why this is expert only.

It looks like we’re headed towards more scalable hosting solutions for the future.  Managing your own dedicated server is both difficult and time consuming. Mosso needs to work on their reliability and uptime but I think they are a company to watch since they seem further ahead than others when it comes to cloud computing.

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Problems for Pandora and other US Web Radio Stations

Pandora is a web site that provides streaming music to your computer, your iPhone, and other devices. It creates customized stations based on music you like and if you give a song a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. You can click on a song you like to go to Amazon or iTunes in order to purchase it. It’s great for finding new music and it used to be a good business.

But the record companies are afraid of streaming radio stations. They brought the issue to the Copyright Royalty Board, which decided last year to raise the cost to play a song over the Internet from 8/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2006 to 19/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2010. Pandora only makes revenue on ads on its website, so this will be quite a bite into profits.

The Washington Post recently talked with Pandora.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”…

“We’re losing money as it is… The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we’re doing is wasting money.”

The problem is in Washington with the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision. First, if the music industry understood what was in their best interests, they would encourage the promotion of their music. Second, these rules only apply to the US. So I can still listen to streaming radio coming from Canada or anywhere else. Only US-based sites are punished. Third, no fees are charged to traditional over-the-air radio stations to play music.

Rep. Howard L. Berman of California is trying to negotiate a deal between web radio companies and SoundExchange, which represents the record companies. Hopefully he can encourage a more reasonable approach to music over the Internet.

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My MobileMe Experience

Oh My, MobileMe

You’ve probably already heard of the disastrous launch of Apple’s MobileMe service. Apple has taken a lot of heat for this and heads have rolled over at Apple HQ for it. There are still some remaining issues to be fixed but for the most part Apple has gotten MobileMe working. I’m currently using a free MobileMe trial to evaluate it to see if it will meet my needs. The biggest of my needs is getting all of my emails from several accounts on my iPhone as quickly as possible.

Push Email

If you use a standard POP or IMAP email account, you are limited to a 15 minute check frequency in the iPhone Mail application. In addition to that limitation, if you set up multiple accounts, it will drain your battery all the quicker. My solution was to set up just one account on the phone and have all the email accounts I want to get mail from forwarded to that one. MobileMe is the perfect choice because it offers push email. Instead of that 15+ minute wait for new mail notification, push means you get near instant notification of a new message. In my experience, near instant means about 10 seconds or less.

When MobileMe launched, it was simply unreliable. Some of my messages would arrive instantly, others would never notify me without opening the Mail app. Besides a couple of bad days this month, things have worked far more reliably lately although I still manually check the mail if I haven’t gotten any notifications in a while. Once I had my MobileMe account set up on the iPhone, I still had to get all my email accounts forwarding to my username@me.com email address.

VersaForward to Forward Email

I use Email Forwarding by VersaForward Service to get all my mail to my me.com address. You can set up all of your email accounts to forward to the email address you check on your iPhone. This is a service with a fee paid monthly or every 6 months. To get a discount, use the promotional code TECHDC when signing up for a free trial. That will give you 50% off the first 3 months. Alternatively, you can run home desktop versions of VersaForward either with the entry-level VersaForward Personal or the more powerful VersaForward Professional.

Once you’ve got your email forwarding set up, you can get all of your email messages on your iPhone in a timely and reliable fashion.

Other MobileMe Features

MobileMe does cost $99/year although it offers more than just an email address. Push contacts and calendar updates help keep your iPhone, Desktop, and laptop all up to date with your latest changes. The MobileMe Gallery is a very elegant photo sharing system which creates a website with your photos to share with others as you want to.

Besides mail, my favorite MobileMe feature is iDisk. You can basically consider this a hard drive that you have access to on your computer but the data is stored on the internet. It is the simplicity of iDisk on your computer that makes this so useful. It appears like an external hard drive would. Drag files to it like normal. You can log in to me.com to access the files on the iDisk so it is a great place to keep important files that you might need remote access to. You have a total of 20GB of storage on MobileMe. You can allocate this between email and data storage. The iDisk can work with Macs and Windows as well.

Give Me a Chance

MobileMe got off to a slow start but now that it is finally working, you can see the advantages that it offers. For me, the push email is the #1 selling point. As long as it continues to work, I expect to become a paying customer. The free trial lasts 60 days so you can try it yourself to see how you like it.