gary’s web sofa

3, the Irish 3G mobile phone operator announced a mobile phone that runs Skype, and an offer that looks on the surface like you can use SkypeOut to avoid paying 3 for most of your calls. They’ve hit the shops, and Damien Mulley, Irish tech blogger extrordinaire has got his hands on one.

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone

They’re a serious R&D outfit that will take on anything that takes their fancy. They’ve been working on active suspension for a few years. Springs and dampers are reactive. A bump in the road hits them, and the springs compress to soak up most of the jolt. The damper then slows down the decompression so the car doesn’t kangaroo down the street. No two bumps are the same severity, so even the best mechanical suspension systems can only cope best with an average bump at an average speed.

Cars roll when going around corners. Again, passive systems can only do so much. As long as the centre of gravity is above the road and the springs can be compressed, the car will lean away from the corner.

Active systems such as Bose’s take dumb mechanical components out of the equation. Springs and dampers are thrown away and replaced with computer controlled pistons that move the wheels up and down to lift them out of the way of bumps and push them into potholes. It’s trivial to ensure that a car stays level the whole way through a corner. They could even make a car lean into a corner if they wanted to.

there are two key things to get right. 1. "something" needs to read the road ahead and make sure the suspension moves at the correct time, and 2. the pistons need to be very precisely controlled and be capable of moving extremely quickly. Bose are nicely positioned to work on both problems.

Bose do very nice noise canceling headphones. They work by taking the sound wave, generating the exact opposite, and feeding it through the headphones. One cancels the other out and the wearer hears nothing. Bose treat the road surface as just another sound wave. They generate the exact opposite, and feed the output to the suspension actuators.

A conventional speaker moves a paper cone very rapidly to produce sound. The cone is attached to a magnet which is positioned inside a magnetic coil. A good speaker must very accurately and quickly move the magnet in and out of the coil to produce the best sound….. which are the same requirements that a good active suspension system needs.

Take a look at the video clip above. At the end they really start showing off. They do a Knight Rider "turbo boost" move and jump a Lexus equipped with their suspension over a kerb without a ramp.

Link via link

Hmmm… Cubic Telecom have come up with a SIM (called "MAXroam") that will be accepted as a local one where ever in the world you use it. They’re using SIP (VoIP) to back haul the call from the caller’s area to the destination, avoiding international call rates, so the total cost is that of a mobile call from the caller to a local number, and from a local number at the other end to the destination.

They’re also going to have phones with wi-fi, which, in conjunction with a free hotspot, will avoid one of the calls, instead connecting directly to their international SIP infrastructure.

Irish firm launches ‘global’ mobile phone | The Register

Imagine you’re a telecommuter in a company where everyone else works out of the office. Your only interaction is via conference calls, email and IM. You miss out on all the work and non-work related chatter that happens in the corridors, other people’s cubicles and in the lunch room. Ivan Bowman in a Sybase subsidiary in Canada was one of those people, but he wanted to change that.

Phase one was to install a webcam in the office, so he could see and hear what was going on, but he couldn’t answer back, and it wasn’t what you would call mobile. They ended up building a remote controllable platform with a webcam, speakers and a touch screen on a pole, so he can roam the corridors, attend meetings and drop into coworkers cubicles just like he was there. He controls it all remotely using a joystick, and the touch screen displays a live feed of his face from his webcam. Some would discard the idea as a toy or gimmick, but I see this as a very workable solution to the disconnect often felt by those who work away from the office.

The Record via Slashdot

One of the big San Francisco colos, 365main.com went tits up earlier and major customers such as Craigslist (free classified ads) and Six Apart (the Typepad and Livejournal blog people) are off line. The power went down to the neighbourhood and the colo’s backup power either didn’t kick in or couldn’t cope with the load. I know our primary colo (InterXion in Dublin) doesn’t sell rack space unless it’s got the generator capacity to manage, and does regular tests to verify it. I get the test reports after the fact. Now I know high availability and redundancy are part of my business so I’m a bit biased, but how do websites get this big and not consider what an outage like this will do to their business?

But why rely on the colo to do all the hard work? Some people put their own UPS equipment in their racks, but if the colo’s power dies, then the aircon goes too, so personally I’d have the servers drop suddenly rather than slowly cook themselves. Besides, the power to the meet me rooms will go too, so you’re going to be without connectivity in many cases too. Fires, floods and earthquakes happen, so all the power, server and storage resilience in the world won’t help with that.

What we’ve had to do is setup a remote warm site. If we lose Dublin totally we use BGP and a few cooperative bandwidth suppliers to route the traffic to our London site where we’ve got replicated data and servers powered on and waiting in the racks. In theory the changeover is instant, but in practice some customers could see up to 5 minutes of an outage, but most are back connecting again within 90 seconds. It’s not cheap to operate this way, but surely Craigslist & Co. have the cash.

Edit: This would have to happen on the very day that they issued a press release boasting about 2 years of 100% uptime for one of their major customers who closed their redundant site because they didn’t need it