It’s been almost a year since I got my PowerBook, so I went and bought the AppleCare. I’ll probably keep this computer until the second generation x86 PB’s come out, which should probably be at least 1 to 2 years from now.

I’m going to max out the RAM to 2GB, coz this machine actually feels kindda slow the way I use it. I guess Photoshop CS needs more than 768MB. 🙂

Om Malik?s Broadband Blog » Long Term Impact of Voice over IM

The Internet connection here didn’t improve much even at after midnight, so it wasn’t the peak hour traffic that was a problem… I called LodgeNet and the guy had no clue and told me he would work on it. I was tired anyway so I went to sleep. Woke up this morning , same thing. Called them again, and I connected my PowerBook to the ethernet directly just so he could ping it. Turn out the Airport Express was the problem. So I thanked him and opened up Airport Admin Util, and I noticed the Airport Express itself has a 10.10 IP address, the hotel DHCP server also assigns 10.10 address, so that didn’t look right. So I pretty much enabled the Distribute IP addresses feature in the Airport Express, which basically turns on its DHCP server, and I had it distribute 198.168 address… rebooted the Airport Express and wala, fast Internet connection again! 🙂

The hotel must’ve changed something yesterday, as the previous Airport Express configuration worked before, and I’ve been here for more than 10 days. hmm…

The connection at my hotel is insanely slow at peak hours, like right now, 20:00 PST… Crazy packet loss… 🙁
[PowerBert:~] ayn% ping www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (64.233.179.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=240 time=136.066 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=2 ttl=240 time=1929.158 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=3 ttl=240 time=929.055 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=4 ttl=240 time=140.096 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=5 ttl=240 time=1066.102 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=9 ttl=240 time=9098.939 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.179.104: icmp_seq=10 ttl=240 time=8099.114 ms

I think I’m gonna watch my NetFlix DVDs instead, I can’t stand slow Internet connection.
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Venture Chronicles by Jeff Nolan: Other Shoe on Google Talk

Of course Jeff Nolan was right, but the thing is, there are already Jabber/XMPP transports that work with AIM/ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo. I’ve used Jabber for years and they work just fine. You do need an account on all the other services to talk to your friends. But Google might add features in their client on top of the regular XML-based Jabber, so you can convince your friends to use their chat client, and then after a while they might very well switch to using Google if the voice (or video, or whatever) feature only works there.

The problem with Jabber is that it was never easy to use, and it was never very stable. To register my Jabber account on my friend Dan‘s server I had to telnet to a certain port at the server and type in XML code (now most clients support registrations). jabberd, the Jabber server, was sorta a hack, and seems like nobody cared enough to maintain it. The MSN and Yahoo transports were also not maintained. With Microsoft and Yahoo trying to block other clients from using their services every other day, they didn’t work half of the times. This was true until very recently, I’m not sure what happened, maybe Dan installed newer versions of the server and transports. Jabber has worked flawlessly for the last several months.

Also, if you domain name doesn’t resolve to your Jabber server, you’re pretty much screwed. And I wanted to have ayn@mydomainname.com instead of ayn@jabber.mydomainname.com. I had the vision that Jabber will eventually replace all the IMs and it would work more like emails, with distributed servers that handle IMs. The Jabber specs supports _jabber._tcp SRV DNS records, so in theory if I include a line in my DNS entry to indicate to where Jabber TCP traffic should go (sort of like the MX entries), it should work. But I don’t think it ever did, last time I tried was 3 years ago though, so this might not be true now.

Google, once again, took an existing technology, vastly improved it (I’m sure they rewrote most of jabberd), added features to it (voice), and rolled it out as a brand new service. Probably 90% of the Google Talk users had not heard of Jabber before. This is pretty cool.

Jealous lover program writer nicked

LOL!