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Give a man a fish…

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Everyone has heard the old saw:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Lao Tzu


But no one seems to think that it applies in the Economic Crisis facing Ireland, with the loss of low end construction and manufacturing jobs, and the multi nationals leaving, the fish are gone. Ireland needs to concentrate on educating fishermen. Or maybe better yet, high tech Developers, Designers and Programmers, Engineers, and scientist which are sorely lacking here. A major investment in education is the only lifeline for Ireland. And even if it doesn’t rescue the Irish Government, it would rescue the Irish people.

Settling back into Cork

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Sunday, and I’m not back on the road to Dublin, I am now configured to work half time for my employer in Dublin rather than a full redundancy. The concession is, I get to work from home, and while this is not the ideal, it should keep us in beer money through this recession. Besides I could use the rest. The job never did require my presence in the office, it’s was only a vast empire of personnel from the perspective of management. I never touched any of the hardware, nothing I did in the office couldn’t be accomplished from anywhere on the planet. I was just another gopher popping out of the cubicle to reinforce the illusion of power. Long live VPN and the internet 😉

Small favors

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Well, that day came on monday night, the call telling me my Dad passed away, the only small favor I managed was that my preparations of my mobile communications has worked out as planned. The Nokia 6300 on Vodafone.ie linked up with the AT&T network in Chicago and using the Palm T/X, I managed to connect to the Edge network on the Nokia to check flight changes, I also checked my email from my MacBook through the 6300 as well without having to pay for WiFi in the Airport. And when I had to make some phone number changes on the phone, the three (Palm/Mac/Nokia) synced up and shared the changes. Almost like they were made by the came company, standards, who knew, I suppose that’s why I don’t use Microsoft products. The only down side, the boss in Dublin knows my phone number, so if the shit hits the fan, I’m still on call.

Web 2 Bloat and Mobile Internet bandwidth

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This article about the Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003, is a further illustration of problems on the Mobile Internet when dealing with Bandwidth issues. With the nature of the mobile web communication methods (GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, etc.) being more often costed on the bandwidth, and usage, rather than on a flat rate found in ADSL and Cable connections, this becomes a costly proposition.

Web 2.0 makes for easy universal ‘Application’ programming, but is inherently expensive to use as a consumer while on mobile web systems like Wap enabled phones and PDA’s. Even utilizing a mobile phone as a bluetooth modem and a laptop, Web 2.0 makes for expensive internet.

So the question remains, Who benefits most from Web 2? It surely isn’t the consumer.

I started out developing web pages, often testing against dialup speeds. Who does that now? Who tests their Web 2 apps against a slow GPRS connection or with the dialup connection many Irish folk still have to put up with? There is a vast marketplace out in the real world where broadband, or rather cheap broadband, handicaps Web 2.0 deployment.

This whole Web 2 experience convinces me further of the need to maintain, and further expand, traditional fat client Client Server application development into the mobile internet. As the internet continues to expand into convergent devices like the iPhone, Symbian and Palm OS based smart phones, Portable Media Players and connected PDP’, Web 2.0 will fail to fulfill the promise and the hype currently being displayed.

Web Apps and customer vs carrier benifits

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I have been in the market for a PDA replacement, and all the conversations I’ve seen, point to the Web Applications being the solution and replacement to client side development on such things as the iPhone/iPod Touch. This harkens back to the the early days of Web when Netscape was being put forth as the new web operating system. The issue then, and in many ways still is, bandwidth. The thin client on the browser required all code from the application to be loaded before the application could activate and the user become productive. This issue still continues in the mobile internet, currently most users using webapps experience delays in application behavior. And this brings up a new concern.

Mobile Web applications are benefiting wireless carriers (who profit from the addition bandwidth use of their users) more than the consumer. In some cases there are ‘unlimited’ data plans with carriers, but mostly there is a cap on bandwidth usage, with hefty overcharge fees applied.

It only makes sense to promote web applications if you are a carrier, or a lazy programmer. This is part of my reasoning for having a PDA, local offline applications. Particularly in Ireland where WiFi or other networks have been slow to deploy and 3G networks are very expensive. Low bandwidth Client-Server applications are the only really customer centric, consumer friendly application development path.

Web Apps are not the best path to my pocketbook.

PDA’s VS Smartphones

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Someone ask me why I’m looking for a PDA instead of the Smart Phone, and while I’ve considered a iPhone, or Palm Centro, the issue is still this.

* Both are using obsolete wireless technology.
* neither can perform PDA duties while the phone is active.

With a PDA, and bluetooth, when the mobile phone technology advances, substituting the phone, upgrades the PDA. And the PDA can operate independent while the phone is in use. Anyone familiar with the evolution of modem technology will understand this, updating the modem to improve communication speed was a common infrastructure issue. As now the speed at which a device can display a block of data, most PDA’s are readily able to perform faster, as they are generally waiting on data.

BTW: Here in Ireland we still depend on dialup Modems.

Home for Christmas

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I’m home, well at least my bolt hole in Dublin, for Christmas. Having spent the last week in Tallaght Hospital with arrhythmia, rapid heart beat and now type 2 Diabetes I feel like a free man. Mind you, I have to go back tonight as there are more tests to take, and then they are going to shock me back to a normal heart beat. Still I’m free today and I have quite a story to tell about the 12 hours I spent in the Tallaght A&E and nice folks there. It looks like Damien has had his share of medical issues this season also, so I’m in good company. I’ll blog more about it when I finally get out of the hospital, I’m SO looking forward to that, as there is no internet there (even though I made a half hearted attempt to hack into their WiFi connections).

The switch from BT to Eircom

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This Friday we were informed we were paying for Eircom Broadband, no modem had arrived, and there was no disruption in service from BT. I was expecting a cutoff of service as Eircom ‘switched’ our service. It was expected as I was expecting them to transfer our ‘port’ from BT to Eircom before they started to charge us for it.

So on a lark, I reset my router to use the Eircom username password, and as easy as you please, the ip address of the router switched, and bingo, we were on Eircom. A quick change of DNS addresses and all was back to normal. Except that the domain was Eircom.

A check of the VPN connection, the primary reason for making the switch, and sure enough, a stable connection. Utilizing the same routers, wires and having made no changes to the router setting, I had a stable and useful VPN connection where BT had claimed it was my equipment.

BT, over the last few weeks, had become increasingly unstable with frequent dropouts, and performance issues. Some of this may not have been their fault, but their inability to repair and maintain, were their fault, and the response of their techies’ was unacceptable.

So now I’m Broadbanding from bigbrotherland, and strangely happy about it.

Bye Bye BT Broadband

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It looks like after the many exchanges of emails, I will have to drop BT as a broadband provider. They are either unable or unwilling to pursue the VPN issues I’ve been having.

When I can connect VPN to my office with a 28kbs dial-up, and can’t sustain VPN traffic on a 3MB/512kBs BT connection, it’s time to change providers. Mind you I still believe that Eircom is at the root of problem. So with that in mind, what are the options?

I’d love to hear of any good broadband providers in the Cork area!

Render all your opinions, please.

VPN tcpdump assistance required

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I’m still battling L2TP VPN connection issues, and at the suggestion of one of my readers I’ve done a series of TCPDUMP runs and they all boil down to the one below.

tcpdump: listening on en1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
20:24:27.580117 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17897, offset 0, flags [none], length: 188) 192.168.23.2.isakmp > vpn.office.com.isakmp: isakmp 1.0 msgid cookie ->: phase 1 I ident: [|sa]
20:24:27.803567 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 59, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 164) vpn.office.com.isakmp > 192.168.23.2.isakmp: isakmp 1.0 msgid cookie ->: phase 1 R ident: [|sa]
20:24:28.094352 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17898, offset 0, flags [none], length: 276) 192.168.23.2.isakmp > vpn.office.com.isakmp: isakmp 1.0 msgid cookie ->: phase 1 I ident: [|ke]
20:24:28.653665 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 59, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 256) vpn.office.com.isakmp > 192.168.23.2.isakmp: isakmp 1.0 msgid cookie ->: phase 1 R ident: [|ke]
20:24:29.290106 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17901, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:30.224387 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 59, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1420) vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft > 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1392
20:24:30.657375 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17903, offset 0, flags [none], length: 100) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 72
20:24:32.667205 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17906, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:34.824612 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 59, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1420) vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft > 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1392
20:24:35.829802 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17910, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:36.504857 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 59, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1420) vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft > 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1392
20:24:38.556036 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17914, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:41.270765 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17918, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:44.272501 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17922, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:47.276414 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17926, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:50.277506 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17930, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:53.285464 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17934, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:56.287335 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17938, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400
20:24:59.290376 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 17942, offset 0, flags [none], length: 1428) 192.168.23.2.ipsec-msft > vpn.office.com.ipsec-msft: UDP, length: 1400

So if the there are any brainier geeks out there that can point to the problem, I’d be grateful.