kugelfish

The management edict to ban telecommuting a Yahoo has stirred up quite a controversy. It seems a bit ironic for an Internet company to admit that telecommuting isn't working for them. Kind of like an oil company saying that the industrial revolution was all a big mistake and we should go back to animal & slave power. But on second thought maybe things are not as black and white. I have spent quite a few years working on systems to make communication and collaboration easier and more frictionless, often collaborating with people 6-12 timezones away. And my social network is equally spread-out across the world. One should think that I should have figured out remote interaction by now. The reality is that despite high-speed networks, cloud-based collaboration tools and high-quality video-conferencing, remote collaboration still is surprisingly hard and (co-)location still matters. Without any obvious reason, the workers of the post-industrial knowledge economy, seem to phys...

One of the side-effects of moving internationally is that one is typically required to completely re-evaluate the set of services which we are generally accustomed to - e.g water, power, telecommunications, transport etc. Partly because traditional utilities are very local and partly because the circumstances of life are more or less subtly organized differently in different places. One such difference can be the available pricing models for a particular service - most commonly some form of flat-rate or metered pricing. In areas where both flat-rate and metered pricing plans exist, analysis often shows that even though many consumer prefer flat-rate, the typical user would be better off with metered pricing, as only very few heavy users manage to fully use or "abuse" the plan. Consumers often quote predictable cost and "no bad surprise" at the end of the month as a key benefit of flat-rate pricing. But another interesting observation to take into account is that in ...

The Swiss government recently reduced the quota for work-permits for applicants from so called 3rd-states - which typically means countries outside the EU and not covered by the free-trade treaties between the EU and Switzerland. After a highly publicized protest led by high-tech companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM, the Swiss government has rather quickly reverted its decision. In the midst of a recession with higher than usual unemployment and increased levels of immigration from the EU following the free-trade agreements, the general mood in the population is not very supportive of any increase in immigration quotas. This is seen as yet another attempt by greedy corporation to undercut the Swiss standard of living by importing cheap labor from overseas - typically from south-east Asia in what is generally by called the IT or information technology sector. How can there be a shortage of IT labor, if almost everybody knows someone who is unemployed and supposedly somehow "in ...

My favorite and most used app on Android isn't even an app, but rather a service. It is the Google Transit public transportation directions feature in Google maps, which can also be accessed more easily through the Maps application on Android - or on any other mobile platform which supports Google Maps for mobile . In combination with the extremely dense and frequent network of public transportation in Switzerland, the transit directions on the phone offer a level of spontaneous mobility, which is generally associated with driving. When it came to using public transportation networks, people tended to know the routes by heart which they frequently travel (e.g. daily commute), while anything else required thorough planing by poring over books of printed time-table - an activity enjoyed only by the most hard-core train buffs. The Swiss public transportation systems has always been particularly well integrated, across all providers and including everything from urban transit, buses, ...

I am notoriously bad at memorizing. If not, I might have gone to medical school and chosen a more lucrative career than Engineering... But as the number of online services I uses increases, so does the number of account username and password combinations. I try to standardize as much as I can on the same usernames(s) but some sites make this really hard by requiring strange and unusual conventions (name must be at least 8 characters long and include at least special character and number??? Whose name looks like that?) or by dictating that the username be whatever 10 digit number their database uses as the unique key for the account record. Same drama for the passwords, except that using a standard password everywhere has the added disadvantage that once the password is compromised, the attacker would have access to all my various online service accounts - if sHe could guess those bloody convoluted usernames... ;-) Things got particularly bad for accounts, which I use very rarely and w...

I now have a cellphone plan, where all outgoing calls are metered and very expensive, except for unlimited calls to 3 favorite numbers, which are included in the plan. For our international calling, we are already using a discount carrier activated through a dial prefix, which also supports a local land-line dial-in access to be usable from mobile phones. By declaring the access number as one of my favorites, I can make unlimited calls from my mobile phone at the substantially lower rate of the discount carrier. The only problems is that making calls through the indirection of a voice-prompt menu is very cumbersome! This is where Phonecard Express comes in. This highly customizeable application inserts itself almost transparently as a filter between the Android system dialer and the telephony subsystem. Whether a call is made from the dialer, the address book or any other intent, the call setup is intercepted and potentially routed through a calling card service. In addition to suppo...

I started using the new Google Voice service as my standard US phone number. Since they currently only support international calling (billed rate), but not international forwarding, the current setup is a bit suboptimal and roundabout: from Google Voice, calls are forwarded to my US based Skype online number, with my skype account itself being forwarded to my current cellphone. The only catch is that the post-dial-delay of this whole contraption is too long for me to pick up the call before it goes to voicemail and since the voicemail delay is not configurable there isn't much I can do. I once managed to catch a call today, by leaping at the answer button on the first ring - it was a wrong number... At least I get an email notification right away, when somebody leaves a message. I could probably just as well turn off forwarding and just use it as a email based voicemail-box.

Some people seem to be using NetMeter for continuously monitoring their network usage against a limited volume data-plan. Since we are now moving to Europe, where stingy data plans with only a few 100Mbs included per month are the norm, I now also have a sudden interest in measuring my monthly data usage. Since NetMeter is a trouble-shooting tool, oriented towards very detailed tracking of network usage over the last few minutes to see what is going on right now, it is not really very suitable as long-term bandwidh counter. The ideal network usage counter should be low overhead and run continuously in the background - e.g. start itself at boot time. In its most basic form, it should show the current monthly total of cellular data usage. It would also be nice to enter the specs of the data-plan to track agains: how much is included per month, what is the rate above that limit and when does the monthly limit reset. For the current month, the ideal application should always show how curr...

Similar to the virtual postal address setup , we are looking to keep a virtual US phone number while being overseas. Reasons for this are to give our friends and family in the US a permanent local number to call, no matter where are at a particular point in time. Having a US number for outbound calls is can also be useful to call US based 1-800 numbers - e.g. to call a credit card company and yell at them to stop sending spam to our vitual mailbox for example... The simplest way to do that would be to get VoIP phone service from a provider like Vonage and the simply pack up the VoIP adapter and US phone and install it wherever we are - using the proper power converters. However, we are doing something slightly more convoluted. Even though Skype became famous for offering free computer to computer calling using a peer-peer, the now also offer gateways to the plain-old telephone service at a fraction of the cost of most other VoIP providers. For $9 per month, we have unlimited callin...

We are about to move to Europe for a few years and during that time, we need to be able to maintain a virtual presence here in the US, to make going back and forth more easy, to stay in touch with friends and family and to take advantage of the greatest consumer paradise on earth, where everything is available for a buck or two. An important part of maintaining a presence is to have a US mailing address - e.g. this required to have a US credit card and to have stuff shipped to you. For certain things a PO box would do, for others you need a real street address - e.g. to accept packages. Traditional mail forwarding places have existed for a long time, basically private mailbox operators who also provide the service to periodically mail the content of the mailbox to a forwarding address. Shipping overseas is really expensive and the idea of getting a box of junk-mail sent to us every months or so does not seem too appealing. Also if something is really important, it might also be urgent ...