I’ve been a happy but puzzled Vonage user. I thought I understood pretty well how VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls make it from my telephone onto the Internet, but I couldn’t figure out how they snake their way back into the phone system to ring a non-VOIP phone in, say, Malaysia (or Roxbury, for that matter). So, I called Vonage and asked them.

When you subscribe to Vonage, you get a modem that plugs into your cable/DSL modem. You plug a plain old phone into the Vonage modem so it can convert the phone’s analog signal into digital, package it into the sorts of packets the Internet expects, pat them on the tush and send them on their way. As Louis Holder, Vonage’s Executive Vice President of Product Development, explained, Vonage has done deals with phone companies in each of the cities where you can get Vonage service. The phone companies sell phone numbers to Vonage that Vonage then offers its subscribers. When a call comes in for a Vonage subscriber, the phone company sends it to a Vonage gateway co-located at the site, treating Vonage as one of its customers. The gateway then sends the call to the appropriate subscriber’s telephone.

But how about when a Vonage customer calls someone who isn’t a Vonage customer? Suppose I want to call someone in Malaysia? Vonage has done deals with companies such as Qwest and GlobalCrossing around the world, installing gateways that turn digital signals back into analog for local delivery. With the Internet, not only is all politics local, but so are all phone calls.

When I asked Louis how Vonage is doing as the telephone companies begin to roll out their own VOIP plans, he said that things are going great. “We’re able to pick the best rates for each market,” he said, explaining why it’s $0.02/minute to Hong Kong but $0.04 to Copenhagen. About the Big Boy competitors now offering the service, he added: “Their first year will be spend fixing bugs.”

By the way, I asked how they pronounce “VOIP” inside Vonage. It’s “voip” as in “void,” although they spell it out for newbies and customers. Now if we can only decide how we want to pronounce “GIF”…

[I am 100% certain I have gotten something wrong here. I’m sure you will tell me what.]

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TigerDirect is advertising Seagate 120GB drives for $59.99 after the rebate. Applying my unique math skills (i.e., I’ve never done a calculation correctly), I think that works out to $511.91 for a terabyte of storage. Why, that’d be enough to store an entire blog, with room left over to download Tetris!

Peter van Dijck tracks storage prices over the years. At this rate, you’ll be able to get 15 petabytes for $120 in the year 2020.

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Every time Symantec AntiVirus 2003 (XP) encounters an incoming message with a virus, i.e. 10-20 times each time I download email, it puts up a dialogue box telling me what it’s found. It’s not asking me for advice or requiring me to make a decision. It’s just patting itself on its back. And it interrupts the download until I press the button to dismiss it, presumably with a muttered “Attaboy, Norton, I mean, Symantec!” Which means I have to sit and watch my screen while I’m downloading email. With 1,200 incoming spams a day, this gets to be a bother.

Anyone know how to tell it to turn off the screens? (Better, how about if Symantec were to pop up a non-modal screen at the end of the process, giving me a summary of how it’s saved my butt?)

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In response to my blogging about pages not saying what they’re about, Hanan Cohen points us to an exceptionally well-written article by Clara Yu, John Cuadrado, Maciej Ceglowski and J. Scott Payne about latent semantic indexing (not to be confused with latex cement and indenting).

Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant… Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.

When you search an LSI-indexed database, the search engine looks at similarity values it has calculated for every content word, and returns the documents that it thinks best fit the query. Because two documents may be semantically very close even if they do not share a particular keyword, LSI does not require an exact match to return useful results. Where a plain keyword search will fail if there is no exact match, LSI will often return relevant documents that don’t contain the keyword at all.

For example: “In an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president’s name at all.”

This is a very well-done article. And it even includes a link to an application of LSI: An automatic essay grader (which is temporarily down because a class is actually using it).

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Glenn Fleischman writes:

The CUWiN [Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network ] project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.

Clay comments over at Corante Many2Many:

As with straight Wifi, the obvious uses of a simple meshing tool are to replace wireline networks where they would be too expensive, but the second-order benefits that will come out will all be novel and often social uses for temporary creation of self-configuring high-bandwidth LANs — internet cafes without the cafe, temporary autonomous file trading zones, video re-mix culture throwdowns in real time.

The old paradigm of top-down network provisioning is so fragile that just one garage-based genius – surrounded by an open source community – could implode it. Exciting.

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Dan Bricklin is thinking about how small software development houses can license their products in ways that provide the benefits of open source but that also build in reasonable compensation for the original creator. Dan is looking for feedback from software developers and others, so take a look and let him know what you think.

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I thought it was just an oddity of my particular set up, but I’ve heard from a reader that he’s having the same problem:

If you do the ^F search thing on this very page as viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Explorer will terminally hang and you’ll have to Ctl-Alt-Del your way out of it.

But, wait, it’s weirder than that! Search for a word that’s visible and near the top, and it’ll work. For example, if you’re reading this in the main blog, not in an archive, try searching for “LCD”. Should be fine. Now try searching for “Scotty,” which is toward the bottom. Hang city.

Happening to you, too? Is IE a total piece of shite or what? (Yes, I do use FirePlace or FireMe or FireStone, or whatever the hell the new Mozilla build is called these days.)

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I’m thinking about switching to an LCD since I’ve been having problems with my 22″ Viewsonic CRT. Just about any LCD will be good enough for text work, I figure, but I’d also like it to work acceptably for fast-paced (= shoot everything) games.

Any thoughts?

And, care to tell me if the following assumption is true? Since 19″ and 17″ LCDs run at the same resolution, there’s not much point in paying the extra couple of hundred bucks for the larger one: It’s just making the pixels bigger.

And the truth is that I’m thinking about getting two LCDs since I use up a lot of real estate in the course of a workday; I typically have 30+ windows open at a time.

Comments, criticisms, instructions to get a Mac?

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Ah, what a perfect morning. Crispy matzoh for breakfast, a cup of delicious coffee, and then a couple of hours trying to clean my PC of adware and spyware, some of it fiendishly clever and as tough to pry out as a hermit crab that’s grown into its shell.

Adaware works pretty well – extremely well since it’s free – but there are some objects that it can’t delete because they are in use. And neither can I, even doing a safe mode start-up. Die 3avxfmcodec.cpy.dll, die!

Some of the little wankers get loaded via my Hosts file, and then reload themselves after I manually delete them. WinPatrol – also free – has been doing a good job of monitoring the various soft startup bellies of XP, notifying me when a program is trying to add itself to auto-start, hijacking my home page or is juist hanging around the schoolyard asking kids leading questions. Their persistence is almost admirable.

Get a Mac? And miss the thrill of editing the Registry? Not on your life!

Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz’s comment, I got a copy of SpyBot. It’s good, but not good enough to get rid of two of the vermin on my system: Something continued to overwrite my HOSTS file, putting in redirects, and something was causing IE to spin up an unwanted page. Even running it while in Safe mode didn’t work.

I’m crossing my fingers that I’ve got it licked. I saved a fixed version of the HOSTS file and locked it against alteration, and I hand edited the Registry, especially some of the funky entries in HKey_USERS/S-1-5-21…etc/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer. (The middle set of numerals is too long to write out.) Check entries like SearchUrl and Toolbar. And good luck to you.

PS: Remember to set a savepoint and to save your Registry before mucking about with it.

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CNN/Money reports that Microsoft and Sun have dropped their lawsuits, although the terms make it sound more like they settled out of court and Sun won: Microsoft has agreed to pay Sun a total of $1.950 billion, while Sun agreed to pay Microsoft royalties for any technology it incorporates into its products. (The Times of India has a franker and more helpful article.)

Yes, Scott McNealy apparently wore
a Trekkie outfit to the press conference

In addition, CEO’s Bill Gates and Scott McNealy announced that they are producing the feature film “Star Trek: Unholy Alliance” in which Captain McNealy of the Starship USS Solaris teams up with The Chairman of the Borg to defeat their common enemy, the Torvaldians from Planet Linooks.

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