So I tried to unlock the account and went through that cycle. It notified me that I couldn’t reset my password to what it is right now. So, if my account is locked, and I’m trying to reset my password to my current password and presuming my internet banking password is correct surely we can just unlock the account. Apparently not. At that point I figure it’s easier to handle this while I’m in Australia instead of trying to get it sorted in the less than two hours of time I had before I needed to head to the airport. There are more pressing matters to attend to handling.

I travel to Australia on a reasonably pleasant QANTAS flight and land then as I’m heading home I start working on getting access again. I give NAB a call and get to a human, start explaining my issue and then BAM! Hung up upon. Ok. That wasn’t quite what I was after. I ring back and have fun with the phone system asking me what I’m calling about. It asks me if I’ve forgotten my password, I say no. It seems to confuse it. I know what my password is, I’d just like you to reset it. The first person this time is nice enough but can’t really help me and transfers me to internet banking who tell me they can’t just unlock my account and only reset my password. I give up on humans at this point and then decide that instead I’ll give the computers another shot from my phone. While ringing in it asks me for my phone banking password which I think I enter but was probably incorrect.

At this point I discover something important. In attempting to reset my password, it tells me I can’t have my password the same. It then tells me that the password I’m entering is invalid because password can only contain numbers and letters – no symbols. The password I was entering in San Jose had symbols in it. The NAB didn’t deign to inform me that the password I was entering was invalid not only because the password is WRONG but because it contains characters that can NEVER be in a password. You’re locking me out of my account and not informing me that my password is incorrectly formed for your system. Don’t even get me started on how insecure and unsafe it is that you limit me to various characters. So I type in a new password however this time it tells me that my telephone banking password has been locked out.

This frightens me even more. I can brute force GUESS someones password through the NAB’s password reset system and it doesn’t appear to validate the phone banking password until AFTER it’s validated the new internet banking password is valid. Alternatively, it’s secretly in the background trying the telephone banking password and failing but not displaying that notification. At this point I give up and figure I’ll visit a branch to get the situation resolved on Monday (this happening on a Sunday). Fortuitously I ventured into a shopping center that had a NAB outpost in it, got an internet banking password reset code and was then able to reset my account.

This highlights another annoyance of mine with internet banking that I’ve complained about for a while but NAB seem indifferent to fixing. If you type your NAB ID and start typing your password quick enough, the UI will helpfully reset your cursor from the password box to the NAB ID box. This means anyone standing behind you stands a chance of seeing some portion of your password as well your NAB ID. This has happened to me many times where the first two characters I type end up in the password box and I see the rest of my password plain text in front of me on screen – in fact it happened just after this situation I’ve described so I know it’s still there. Convenience is more important than security.

But let’s review things here. They’ve got a confusing process where in they change your password quicker than the UI hides those characters on iOS. This is a usability problem because in this particular case I was confused that I made a typo when I hadn’t. Their password system will lock out an account for entering a password that isn’t valid within their system but doesn’t tell you that the password you entered contains characters that aren’t valid. Their password system won’t let you set arbitrarily complex password which tends to mean they’re probably not hashing it somewhere and likely it’s stored plain text for someone in the bank to be able to read as they will. Their password reset system either tests your telephone banking password, doesn’t tell you it’s wrong and locks you out due to issues with your internet banking password OR much worse it doesn’t test it at all meaning you can use it to verify what someone’s password is without having to try to login as the person. Potentially that isn’t protected against multiple bad attacks either which means there is potentially an entry point for a brute force attack. And finally the situation where you can be typing your password in a password box and NAB Internet Banking will expose your password to anyone potentially looking at your screen.

Seems I hit the jackpot of issues all at once. Lucky me.

To be honest I’ve seen this tactic before where vendors lock you into a given platform. And realistically Apple is already there in a sense. They limit your ability to distribute iOS applications and limit what you can include in their store. Anyone expecting Apple to behave any differently in this particular situation is delusional.

Fundamentally you need to think about what iBooks Author really is providing: it’s a typesetting tool. It’s not targeted towards print like InDesign or Quark, it’s a tool designed to highlight the capabilities of the iPad platform. But essentially it is a typesetting tool in a world where you’re not limited to static content but can build interactive content. And at the moment no other tool really exists to provide this functionality because the platform really hasn’t existed yet. But that doesn’t mean someone can’t make a tool that does do all of this just like when the iPhone was first released the smart phone market didn’t quite have what the iPhone offered. There were products that had portions of the system: many platforms had installable apps, many platforms had web browsers, a few platforms had large screens for input and many had phone and data capabilities. None of them quite had everything that the iPhone offered which is what made it successful.

Now what is being missed here is that effectively the results of what you typeset in iBooks Author is limited in where you can sell it. What Apple suggest is that you can develop your content in another tool such as either Pages or Word and then finalise your typesetting in iBooks Author. You can obviously produce your content entirely within iBooks Author but you don’t necessarily have to do this.

However at the end of the day it is this strange sense of entitlement, this sense of how dare Apple seek to limit what you could potentially do with a bit of software they have given away for free. This reminds me of people lamenting that you couldn’t write iOS apps on Windows and that Apple should port it.

At the end of the day it is their ecosystem, if you don’t like it then leave. Certainly this isn’t the first time Apple have taken draconian steps to limit freedom and it likely won’t be the last. It also reminds us that we need to read these agreements we agree to on the sides of the Apple Mac App Store. All of the Apple developed apps I’ve seen on their store have all had an accompanying “App License Agreement” so I wasn’t surprised to see this one.

Audacity in putting the terms there perhaps, however it is hardly unprecedented. Perhaps the audacity is the expectation that a for-profit company known for their tendency for draconian restrictions on their software and platforms would behave any differently when creating a new free tool to create content aimed towards their platform. What is really more surprising that they didn’t create an entirely new proprietary format…they just added some stuff to an existing one (not quite as evil but certainly up there).

And the story begins around December 2010 with a defective iPhone 4 and Exchange. I had attempted to forward an email out of my work’s Exchange mailbox to a system administrator I was sitting next to from my iPhone. For some reason at the time this didn’t work quickly so I tried to forward it a few more times from my iPhone. It didn’t turn up at the other end and I forgot about it. Over the next few days I noticed that my phone was warmer than usual however I couldn’t work out what was going on. I made sure any application I could think of that would use data was terminated and I even tried to restart my phone at one point to make sure it was clear. I noticed that it was continually transmitting data but it continued to do that even after a restart of the phone. What’s going on?

I ended up in the mail application and noticed that it had a messaging saying there was one unsent message. I jumped into the outbox on the phone and saw that there was an error against the message that I’d been trying to send earlier in the week. I nuked it and watched my data usage stop increasing. By this time I’d received a wonderful SMS from Telstra letting me know that I’d gone over my limit. Was frustrating to be told I’d gone over my limit without knowing why it had happened.

Having figured out what was the root cause of the issue, I contacted Telstra. Unfortunately the fellow on the other end of the phone informed me that until I had a bill they couldn’t do anything for me. They did however give me a reference number and said that when the bill came that they would waive the data charges. Suffice to say that when the bill came, I called back and the person said the data charge had been waived. It turns out that they hadn’t waived the charge and a month later I called back and actually got some progress this time. It is disappointing that I had to ring three times to get it sorted however at all times the experience was positive and supportive.

In the mean time I had filed a bug report with Apple (actually before I contacted Telstra and I provided that bug report number to Telstra so that they could verify it if they needed it). I worked with the World Wide Developer Relations team to triage the issue and provide log files. I conclusively managed to nail it down to an issue with MobileMail’s background thread that would continue to resend the mail even though it was failing. The error seems to be a part of the ActiveSync protocol and there are some funky results returned.

As an aside, a month later or so I noted an article complaining about Windows Phone 7 chewing data from CNet (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20030159-75.html). The article for the most part blamed Yahoo! but I also noticed something very interesting at the bottom:

Microsoft has also identified an issue with our Exchange ActiveSync [EAS] email synchronization protocol that may affect a very small percentage of users.

• This issue can be caused by email that exceeds the mail server email size setting or is sent to an invalid email address
• This issue can potentially affect email services that utilize the EAS protocol – Outlook and Gmail for example
• The immediate mitigation is for users to delete mail that appears “stuck” in the outbox
• This is currently scheduled to be fixed in a near-term end user update from Microsoft

Now the email in question that I was using was nearly 8MB with a 6MB PDF file as an attachment. I think that fits into some of the mail size settings. The service in question was the Exchange Active Sync protocol as implemented on the iPhone. The mail did appear to be “stuck” in the outbox and the iPhone kept sending it and apparently there will be an update from Microsoft. I’ve gone through again today and reproduced the issue on my iPhone4 running iOS 4.3.5 which is Apple’s latest stable release. In doing this I noticed that the phone was sending nearly 1MB of data each minute.

So now this happened another time and given my last experience I wasn’t worried about it. The last time it happened while it took three calls the matter was resolved relatively painlessly. I didn’t call when it happened because last time it didn’t make a difference – and that wasn’t necessarily Telstra’s fault the first time. However eventually the bill came and curiously this time Telstra sent me an SMS informing me of what I’d already known – I’d gone over my data limit. This time it gave me a message suggesting that I call a particular number.

I’ll be blunt and say that I was actually really excited and impressed. Telstra was actually making a positive move to get an issue resolved pre-emptively. I presume this was set up as an automated feature however someone put some thought into it somewhere. That, tied with the last experience, had me hopeful that I’d have a great experience. Oh how I ended up being wrong.

I rang the number, got through and explained what I wanted to happen and was told “You’ve rung the wrong number, I don’t actually handle that.” Wait, what? I rang the number your SMS’d me to suggest to ring for this particular issue. And the first contact I have informs me I’ve rung the wrong number. Someone hasn’t communicated properly internally. Anyway, the fellow gives it a go and is out of his depth. He tells me there isn’t any problems with the iPhone. I have two open issues with Apple for the iPhone (one of them being this one) as well as a few other that are marked as duplicates. I’m well and truly certain there are faults with the device, so someone on Telstra’s Sales team has drunk more of the cool-aid than I have. But I digress, I tried to explain that this had happened before and that I had an issue report with Apple. The fellow has a chat with his supervisor concerned he’s not going to get a commission from this call then transfer me to the iPhone department assuring me that he’d communicated my issue to them.

So the iPhone person gets on the phone and starts explaining to me how to turn off the cellular data on my iPhone. I try hard to treat Telstra’s customer service representatives with respect, inform them of relevant bug reports and even reproduce the issue and what I get treated like an idiot. At this point I felt that I’d met my obligation to attempt to contact the provider to get the issue resolved and they wanted me to disable cellular data. Go figure.

At this point I put through my complaint to the TIO. After a bit of a false start I got a contact with Telstra’s customer service representative and we discussed the issue. It started get back towards the sort of positive customer relationship that I’d like to have with my telephone provider. Unfortunately Telstra’s billing system continued to pretend that nothing had happened and even managed to send me a suspension notice for my account after the overdue notice. So kind.

Anyway, fast forwards another month I’d been wondering that I should have a bill from Telstra and it arrived earlier this week. I got back on Wednesday and opened up the bill to find that it noted that I had an overdue amount of $66. I went through my records and couldn’t find an invoice matching that amount. I did find that overdue notice and suspension notice so I almost wonder if Telstra’s billing system missed sending me a bill or if it got lost in the post. In any case I rang Telstra to ask about it and got them to send me a second invoice. They informed me that my last bill was apparently $220 or so and my last payment was a couple of days before the end of the billing period which doesn’t make sense. Today I get a wonderful overdue notice letter again demanding I pay the uninvoiced outstanding amount. Great. How about including the outstanding invoice as well when you do that Telstra plus any other additional invoices that might have been sent. Let me say I’m less than impressed, particularly when I saw that this bill was the first to note a charge reversal. My TIO complaint was filed on June 8th. That means that its taken them two billing cycles to get this correct (again). I don’t think I should be surprised. However I do find it rather arrogant that when it involves a debt to myself it takes Telstra two months to resolve the issue but when they want to extract money from me they don’t let it exceed more than a month before they’re sending nastygrams.

After all of this I’m curious if Windows Phone 7 or other Microsoft based operating systems that utilise ActiveSync have similar problems. I note that my Outlook desktop client doesn’t have this issue and successfully forwarded my test email. Android would also be another interesting test case to see how it behaves to see if the issue can be replicated there or if it is truly a bug with iPhone.

Sooner or later I’ll get all of this resolved though I’m soon to be a happy non-customer of Telstra. Not that Optus is better and Vodafone certainly isn’t an option but fortunately I’ll have an entirely new set of providers to be upset by in a weeks time.

Everyone pans Apple for this as their option. There is very little blog posts that appear to defend and support Apple in their stance of not having a native SDK and only providing a web “SDK”. Almost every bit of out spoken opinion out there seemed to point negativity towards the direction that Apple had taken. To be fair the initial release of the iPhone and it’s integration is primitive compared to what we have today with items like launcher integration being unavailable initially. However if you spend some time to review what Steve Jobs actually says it becomes more interesting. He states “we have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure”. It is this phrase that informs the future direction of the app store.

In 2008 Apple releases at first a beta in March with the announcement of the App Store with the first hint of “approval” for application. At WWDC2008 later in the year it’s finally released and the App Store is scheduled for it’s release in September of that year. In line with what Steve has said back in 2007, the App Store approval process and some rather strict guidelines for what they will accept. While some of the guidelines are arbitrary and awkward, they do appear to have successfully managed to limit the amount of malware and devious applications that have managed to make their way onto end user devices unlike Google’s Android Marketplace. Amazon with their App Store for Android have similar approval guidelines as well which seems to support Apple’s approach in part.

Since then Apple have increased their restrictions and adding requirements such as requiring in app purchases to at least be available via Apple’s own mechanism. Depending on what happens with the Lodsys case, it may turn out to be a case where you either use the supplied API or you have to deal with the patent issues.

However it appears that the Financial Times aren’t interested in trying to fight Apple at their App Store limitations and have gone back to 2007 and have developed a web app. It utilises local storage to make things faster on the device and it features a lot polish.

But for all of the noise generated about how evil Apple is, the Financial Times are the first group I have seen to actually put their money where their mouth is and released a HTML5 application that looms really good as the number of devices with Android on them explode, I am surprised that more people aren’t realising that web apps are the future of mobile development unless you war to loco yourself inside of apples iCloud. Web based applications also have the ability to target Android without requiring a rewrite and also any other platform that ships a decent web browser (e.g. WebOS or perhaps Windows Phone 7).

With over 300 different smart phone devices out there with a wide range of functionality, display sizes and resolutions. With native applications needing to target iOS, Android, WebOS, Playbook and Windows Phone 7 each with different code that is a significant development burden. With Windows 8 looking like it will implement HTML powered web apps then increasingly it is looming like HTML is not a bad place to put some skill development or professional development.

Perhaps it is back to Apple’s original much derided original direction – even if it was because their native SDK wasn’t available at the launch time of the first iPhone. It was even announced today that iOS5 will bring Nitro JavaScript, one of the speed ups to make web pages in Safari load faster, to the “homepage” apps of which the new Financial Times web app is now one. This means that with iOS5, the Financial Times will run even faster again.

But it begs the question, why would Apple make a mechanism that competes directly with their App Store run even faster?

So this tells me that at least Android 2.1 level applications do not respect the proxy settings I had set up. I’ve obviously got something set up properly because the web browser users them. Looking around there seems to be suggestion that I should root the device to set proxies properly or something. For something that “just works” on an iPhone and it is something of a no brainer I would have thought it would have worked fine on Android, at least with Google’s own applications.

However the real nail in the coffin is the lack of complete 802.1x authentication, which while improving it appears that USQ’s current configuration makes it fail. USQ has started to deploy of 802.1x wireless networks to reduce the requirement to log into the wifi network, log into the Cisco access points and then from there gain access. This meant that the earlier wireless network testing was possible albeit a little tedious. Using it from an iPhone was just as tedious however there were apps to get around it. As of this week they’ve switched that network off and now Android doesn’t want to play the game.

The first problem with the 802.1x network is that USQ uses a certificate signed by AusCERT which doesn’t appear to be in the normal trust path for either Android or iOS. iOS gets around this by prompting the user to accept the certificate like what normally happens on a desktop web browser when an untrusted certificate is presented. One has to go through a rather complicated set of hoops to get this working on Android from what I’m told including putting the certificate on an SD card and navigating through a few layers of menu. Having the user download the certificates independently, find an SD card writer, put it on the SD card and then going through a process to import the certificate isn’t particularly user friendly. When you consider that USQ has something like 5000 people on campus so this sort of task doesn’t particularly scale well as opposed to clicking “accept”. Once we’ve gotten over that hurdle the second problem appears to be getting the Android device working properly with the AES encryption used. Apparently this is a barrier that an USQ ICT member with a masters degree is currently tackling though I believe that Android doesn’t support AES only PKIP so I don’t think he’ll have much luck.

Of course on iOS its rather easy, select network, enter credentials, accept certificate and then add proxy settings to the network. And you’re done. This was enough to convince one of our faculty librarians that perhaps the Sony Xperia X10 that they bought in the last few months was really not worth fighting against and now wants an iPhone. The X10 was sold with Android 1.6 which really just makes you wonder about fragmentation in the Android platform.

UPDATE: USQ’s certificates are signed by AusCERT, Australia’s version of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), not self signed as I had earlier suggested. AusCERT’s CA doesn’t appear to be in the normal certificate bundle for either platform. This means it came up unverified which is why I had assumed we’d been using self-signed certificates. The secondary issue appears to be the more secure AES being used for the authentication instead of the less secure PKIP. Android doesn’t support the more secure AES and thus fails to work even when the certificate is trusted or the signing CA is added. Additionally I’ve been told that you don’t need to root the device to install a certificate but you can put it on an SD card. These changes have been merged into the main document where relevant.

From here I set apart removing extra components until I got down to what I felt was the absolute minimum. I’ve actually been a bit lenient and included a few extra components I wasn’t quite willing to part with. In the administrator area I’ve killed almost all of the components except for content, frontpage and media. The admin modules are gone as a lot of the front end modules. The search plugins are mostly removed except for content and the XMLRPC layer is dead. A few of the templates are dead and I’m asking a friend to make a simple one as a replacement for rhuk_milkyway. I’ve also cleaned out some images and I nuked a lot of legacy junk that isn’t required any more.

I’m calling it Pine Tree as a difference though since I don’t really take apart the framework it isn’t that much lighter than a normal Joomla! instance. A copy is available on my JoomlaCode project, check out at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pasamioprojects/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5353. It is slightly branded though not a lot. There is one minor bug fix but on the whole it is a copy of 1.5.20 with a whole heap of stuff removed. Oh and don’t bother with the sample data or migration, either option will likely fail (will probably remove these later). There is also no administrator so don’t bother clicking on that either. Pine Tree template design and quick logo done by Making Digital Design. Let me know what you think.

But I’d like to take a step back and detail one of the projects I’m working on at the moment. At USQ we’re working on a media repository to store our media files for course materials and lecture recordings. One of the aspects is mediating connecting the raw recordings (done in Camtasia Relay) with the courses which are in Moodle. Camtasia’s support for Moodle is a bit awkward and we’d like to improve it a bit more or build an interface that at least mediated things so that we can choose to put things into Moodle (our learning management system) or the new media repository. So we need a bridge of sorts. Being a PHP person and PHP being one of the most preferred programming languages at USQ (see Moodle) I figured I’d do it in PHP. Then I realised I wanted to do it properly and needed authentication integration plus a few other tricks. I also figured I’d like to have a controller, view and a model for stuff. Then I figured I’m going to need some database drivers, particularly Oracle but for initial testing I’m going to need to do it locally outside of the normal development framework since its essentially a skunkworks project.

The choice I’ve taken is to use the Joomla! Framework and strip out the majority of Joomla! to put in what I need. In this particular case I’ve picked up the authentication plugins, user plugins and user component from Joomla! and left all of the content stuff behind. I’ve started adding my own extensions to the project to handle the aspects required, pulling in some of the DAV support work I did for Joomla! a while ago and including that into the libraries. So the pieces are slowly coming together and eventually I’ll get everything up and running properly. I’ve also ported Joomla! in a small part to an SQLite3 database where I’m putting stuff for the time being. I’ve grabbed a stock joomla.sql file for MySQL, modified it to be SQLite friendly and then I’m using that base database to handle everything. It has more than I need in it table wise but that doesn’t necessarily cause concern but perhaps wastes a bit of space. I’ll hook up everything and get it to work, perhaps a bit heavier than it needs to be but also immediately portable back into a Joomla! instance later if this is the path I want to take.

Perhaps at a JoomlaDay somewhere I’ll demo it.

A long time ago I was a reasonably happy Telstra customer. I think I’ve mentioned this before. But then I got sick of the lack of features that they offered me (or the features they didn’t offer me) since I was a pre-paid mobile phone customer. The feature that really hurt was the lack of international roaming. I tried hard but they wouldn’t offer it so I went off to look at my options: Optus and Vodafone. Optus had the slightly better international roaming coverage due to their Singtel links and covered more countries that I cared about than Vodafone. Vodafone’s coverage leaves a lot to be desired where I live so that helped me go to Optus.

When I left Telstra they had this interesting way of handling credit. If you bought a three month duration of credit, you got three months added. If in a month you added another three month amount you got another three months added – so at that point you had five months left. Optus didn’t have it this way and in Optus land you choose between having reasonable deals or having reasonably long lasting credit. The default option was a TurboCap which was limited to a month expiry (and in most cases a month renewal but there are two week options) and the alternate option was a two month expiry with much less options. I went for that as I didn’t much use my phone so the TurboCap didn’t interest me.

My girlfriend all of a sudden got me an iPhone and on a new prepaid item so that meant a new phone number. This new one was on Optus’ TurboCap because it was the only prepaid option that provided data with it. But here is the trick that isn’t documented in their terms and conditions however there is actually an absolute limit. Yes, there is a point where Optus won’t accept your money any further. There are all sorts of limits on their extra cap features (MyTime money, MyBonus) which I understand however the MyCredit has a limit of $300. That means that once you hit this limit YOU CAN’T RECHARGE AND LOSE ALL OF YOUR MONEY. I can’t emphasise this enough. Optus have an arbitrary limit not described in their terms and conditions. I walked into an Optus store and the girl told me what was wrong and said it was in the terms and conditions. She pulled out a brochure and went looking through it but couldn’t find it. I ended up ringing Optus to complain about it and they offerred to kindly resolve the situation by removing $30 off my account so that I could recharge and not lose all of my credit. Thanks Optus. But whilst I was on the phone, the bloke dropped another pearl of wisdom. If you don’t recharge more than $40 on the TurboCap your data credit doesn’t roll over. Since I recharge from my NAB ATM I only have the option of $30, $50 and I think $100 I have as my recharge options. So I have to get $50 every recharge to retain my data. I tried a $30 recharge and with the previous $50 recharge (less lets say $10), it took me a week of normal data usage and almost no phone calls to burn through all the credit. So to retain my data credit I need to get $50 each month (there is no cheaper option with data on it). Since I don’t use the phone much it means that in 5 months I’ll be at the point where I’ll be unable to recharge properly again. At this point I guess I can let my data credit expire and use my data to burn through everything. But I’d rather not.

So the next Optus product I bought was a wireless broadband package. Optus again had the better deal and half decent coverage where I want to use it so they won. Plus they threw in a small booster antenna that I don’t think makes a difference but anyway. They also had a money back deal where if it wasn’t working with coverage then I could return it. Telstra didn’t seem to have that and to be honest that’s what sold me to Optus (yes they can do good things when they try). I got it home, it worked and continues to work reasonably well. But here’s the rub: periodically it decides that I don’t have credit. It’ll drop out a few times or just stop and redirect my browsing to a no credit page. This has happened a few times even though I’ve had credit and it annoys me. If it drops out then that is fine, wireless does that. But to drop out repeatedly, direct me to a “zero credit” screen and then drop out a few more times before working is just down right annoying. Plus I’m sure they debit me 10MB of credit each time it drops out and I reconnect (around 60MB, or 1% of $100 worth of credit). So after a few times I’m seeing a few percent uselessly disappear from my account. So today I actually ran out of credit. Helpfully it sent me an SMS (that I can’t read since I’m online) when I had 20MB left which was approximately 10 minutes before it cut me off completely. Useful. Of course Optus will tell me that I need to use their crappy application or something to view stuff however the supplied device barely installed on Snow Leopard, it required me to extract the package archive to get to a sub installer for the driver to get things to work and then manual device configuration. Thank the internet for instructions because Optus’ own instructions didn’t work. I also tried registering for the Optus Zoo and it just claimed that the mobile number was invalid so I can’t use that to check my balances online either. Thanks Optus.

Some of the reason I prefer prepaid is that I only pay for what I use not a fixed amount and then get charge an exorbitant amount if I all of a sudden go over. Prepaid works for me this way. I have a VISA debit card for similar reasons – I prefer to spend what I have rather than getting a “loan” where possible which is what a credit card or a post-paid mobile phone is. I prefer that control of my own and I get repeatedly shafted by either Telstra or Optus for wanting this control. Other issues are also there such as arbitrary limits not defined in terms and conditions annoy me especially when you get hit by them out of nowhere. All in all it almost makes me feel like making that faustian deal and going with Telstra. At least then I’d get faster internet and better signal coverage. Might even be cheaper.

I’ll start with Safari because that’s where the discussion began with. Many years ago there were two major browsers for the Mac: Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Netscape on a Mac at primary school was my first exposure to the internet which dialed into the local University and used their connection. This was back when browsers still costed money to acquire, we’ve come a long way. At one stage Netscape was shipped by default but as we progressed with Mac’s, Internet Explorer became the default browser that shipped on Mac OS (along side Netscape). Microsoft really had no interest in continuing to develop for the platform that they started their life on (yes, Word was originally a Mac application, which is why it has quirks like Mac’s) and their browser stagnated on the platform. In 2003, Apple announced that they were effectively forking KHTML and building their own browser which ended up being included as the default browser in Mac OS X 10.3 (that same year) with Internet Explorer an alternative and then as the only browser in Mac OS X 10.4 (which was where I started my Mac journey).

It was a bumpy road for Safari but they came out the other end with the open source project “WebKit”. This is significant because today WebKit is used more places than Mozilla’s Gecko engine. WebKit forms the basis of Safari on Mac, Windows and iPhone/iPod Touch for Apple developed products but is now a part of Google’s Chrome browser and their Android mobile phone platform and Nokia are using it with their Symbian S60 phones. Apple, Google and Nokia. There are other browsers that are picking it up, like Epiphany on Linux (moved from Gecko to Gecko and WebKit to just WebKit), iCab and Omniweb. There were also those browsers who were built around it,  like Shiira and Google Chrome. Just recently Palm has joined the mix with their new “Pre” handled being heavily powered by WebKit (you know, the iPhone killer). Really quite scary when I think how out of nowhere really this rendering engine has appeared and taken market dominance away from Gecko.

And Gecko, the engine that powers Firefox that came from the Netscape line. Gecko at one stage was the engine of choice for GUI based browsers for Linux. Sure there were other browsers out there that did their own thing but nothing really compared to Gecko. Gecko powered Mozilla’s Navigator line as well as Firefox but it also held a lot of sway amongst the GNOME guys as well. Gecko was the engine that powered Galeon. Galeon was perhaps for the longest time my most favourite web browser for Linux. It was lighter than Firefox and in some respects has some features that Firefox is only just getting. Unfortunately the Galeon people had a falling out and some moved to Epiphany. Epiphany has never been the browser that Galeon was which is disappointing to see.

Next on the list is Opera. Opera has never really been my favourite browser though it does have some nice features, I just never picked up on it. I continue to have a copy of Opera laying around my Mac but the last time I seriously used it was for testing websites when I wandered complete cookie isolation when both Safari and Firefox were busy being useful. The time prior to that was before Firefox 3 was in beta (Minefield!) and I wanted to test some CSS that Safari 3 rendered fine but Firefox 2 refused to display properly. Firefox 3 didn’t render the page perfectly (still) but it did go a long way to getting it right and Opera got a bit further but not quite there. Opera has some really cool features such as tab previews and their ‘quick dial’ page as well as the ability to embed ‘widgets’ into the application as well which seem to be able to work at a higher level than the Firefox extensions appear to work within normally.

Last on my list is Internet Explorer. IE is these days predominantly a Windows only web browser though in its history there were ports to both Mac OS (8, 9, X) and UNIX. IE also makes an appearance for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating systems as well. It is most revered perhaps for its lack of ability to follow standards and interesting flaws such as the PNG transparency issue. Interestingly since the Mac version 5 diverged using the Tasman layout engine not the Trident engine (Trident being the engine behind the Windows versions which is still used to this day). Tasman aimed to follow the standards and did so quite well and as such it didn’t feature IE’s Box Model bug and had better XHTML, CSS and PNG support (with full transparency and colour correction). The Tasman layout engine lives on today within Microsoft TV Mediaroom Edition with rumours it’d be used in IE7 which turned out not to happen. IE has been known to introduce a few features that have lived on however. The favourite icon support was first seen in IE an the AJAX revolution was started by Microsoft’s XMLHTTPRequest object. IE is also well known for the things it has introduced that have caused issues, such as ActiveX controls, insecurity with various security flaws and inappropriate designed trust models in addition to the fact that each version introduces new quirks and bugs for rendering inventing the need for browser specific hacks to get a page to render the same. Yes, I’m sure every web designer in the world loathes this browser but with Microsoft’s monopoly it is unfortunately not going to disappear overnight. Shame really.

At the end of the day I use Firefox the most on Windows (gaming PC, others PC if possible), Mac (main desktop) and Linux (work desktop). When I was using Windows for my work machine I had IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Most of my browsing lived in Firefox but I used Chrome for my GMail accounts to keep them in their own little play pen away from where I was working. My gaming machine has a similar set up but since I usually only search to work out why games aren’t working (you’d be surprised by how much old games stop working when you change their preferred DirectX version), that usually just means Firefox. My Mac at the moment is a battle ground between Firefox and Safari. Safari at one stage in the last week was the only browser I had open after I got annoyed with Firefox eating CPU and memory. Safari is a might lighter browser and I do enjoy it over Firefox at times. It has features like the ability to save all of the tabs in a window into a bookmark folder and then to open bookmark folders as new tabs. It allows me to save a window full of ‘research’ easily and close that browser window off until I need to work on it again and then immediately everything is back. Until Firefox 3.5, Safari also had a “reopen  last closed window” option which was unique and similar to the “reopen last closed tab” that has been around in Firefox for a while. Safari doesn’t have the last closed tab yet (annoyingly) however Firefox 3.5 nicely introduces the window option along side the tab option (I’ve already used it once since I switched to the beta). Firefox 3.5 also adds the ability to drag tabs out of a window into another window or their own fully fledged window, something that Safari has had for a while and that Google implemented within Chrome. It isn’t as smooth or slick as the WebKit browser’s implementation but it is a start and is useful for those times when you want to break a window out into its own, or join it to another window, but since it has a form in it that you’ve entered details in or something that you can’t easily get to (YouTube video, shopping cart submission, etc) with a direct link. Safari’s version is very smooth and neat whilst Firefox still has a lot of rough edges to sort out but it is a start that it is at least there. The Safari 4 beta had some interesting features that they took out, the fact that the tab bar was merged into the window title was one I liked personally as it gave me even more screen real estate for my web pages, so I’m sad to see it gone in the final. Firefox has the nicer developer tools and I feel at home with Firebug however Safari also has some quite capable tools available. The latest release of Firebug annoys me that they make it more complicated to enable a panel, instead of landing on a panel and having the option to enable it, it tells you to click on a few places to enable it. Frustrating that I can’t click a big button that just says “make it so” to enable it but that is life – since I have the old Firebug at work I still prefer it over the newer one my home FF3.5 instance has. Opera has a small place on my Mac and is really an incidental browser and comes fourth to Shiira, a WebKit powered browser. Shiira has some interesting concepts such as the ability to put a page into a sidebar (with tabs) that you can then use to power the main page. It turns out especially useful for those long link list pages where you click on them to go down into a content page but they provide no easy option to navigating to the related links unless you hit the back button. Shiira also has some other interesting UI changes which makes it my third place browser on the Mac (especially when I am navigating a complex web page with a link structure as noted before).

All in all it is interesting to sit down and look around to see what the world still looks like with HTML5 around the corner it will be interesting to see how the browsers adapt to the future.

As a phone user I’d started as a Telstra “communic8″ user for my first phone. This worked out well as at the time Telstra had this ‘feature’ where you could link it to another phone that was on a plan (my dad’s) and it could give you a nominated amount of money a month ($10) and one months ‘access’ for this token amount. On top of this you were permitted something like three calls per day for around 3 minutes to that same number for free. Rather handy that you didn’t need credit to call home. Other useful things Telstra had (and might still have) is that your access to the network and credit expiry accrued each time you recharged up to about two years. I know this because I managed to get just that amount of access accrued on my Telstra phone before I switched.

All in all I was happy with Telstra as they have arguably the best coverage in Australia for mobile phones. They aren’t the cheapest mind you but all in all I was happy since most of the premium crap that required a plan didn’t interest me and my phone really didn’t support those features (an ancient Motorolla, a Nokia ‘potato phone’ 3315 and a Nokia 6310i that I think my nan has). It turns out with Joomla! I end up overseas periodically and the first time this happened (a trip to Thailand in 2005), it really hurt not having any phone connectivity.

So at this point I went to Telstra and asked them what their international roaming options where for prepaid. The answer was simple: upgrade to a plan. I happen to like being prepaid and interestingly for the fact that I’ve already given them the money (e.g. they’re already earning interest on it before I’ve used it in addition to being more expensive) I still don’t get service. I’m personally not the sort of person who likes borrowing money if I can avoid it, so that means anything credit related (e.g. credit card, mobile phone) gets avoided where possible. This turns out remarkably easy, prepaid telephone only gives you what you pay for and a VISA debit card gives you access to your own money. Interestingly, and perhaps this is why providers hate prepaid, it is possible to continue to ‘rollover’ your credit from period to period by renewing even if it is the smallest amount. This means that you never lose what you pay for where as regular plans are a pay for it if you use it and pay more if you use too much (Optus was half decent where they had a ‘rollover’ for a few months scheme, not sure if it still runs but it exemplifies the fact you by design pay for what you aren’t going to use as opposed to prepaid which is pay for what you use).

So I decided at that point to stop being a happy Telstra customer and switch. Vodafone offered on of the best deals with their cap plan (this is about a month before their major advertising promotion on it) and to be honest it was really attractive – however the cap plans didn’t have international roaming. So they had some nice phones and all was good cost wise for prepaid (which did have international roaming) however Vodafone’s coverage for Toowoomba is below substandard. Given that my mum lives a good 20 minutes drive out of town that would mean I probably wouldn’t get coverage there. Here is where Optus come in with second rate costing but a far more advanced phone network. Optus also offered international roaming on their prepaid and the rates were a bit more (roaming always is a rip off) however you have a cost to pay for these things. They offered good coverage over places I’m likely to go to so that was good. Optus being owned by Singtel also meant that Singapore was incredibly cheap, Asia was relatively cheap and everywhere else was expensive (relative to international roaming costs). It actually reminds me of when I came back from Malaysia that it was cheaper to roam on my prepaid Malaysian SIM card than to go back to Telstra (yes, it was cheaper for me to SMS from a phone roaming from Malaysia to Australian networks than it was for me on Australian to even the same carrier) – and this is back in 2004.

So I’ve been on Optus and travelled around the world roaming quite happily. It costs an arm and a leg however I’m happy with that and expect it. I thought about my last trip overseas which costed a fair amount of money, much more than I normally spend in a month (and this is over a week) and wonder where the wisdom in not giving me the ability to spend money is. I mean really, when I want to spend money with you make it easy! A while after I switched to Optus I got a new Nokia N80 (noticing a trend here) and I’ve had that for a while now and I’m quite happy with it, however as a slide phone the design annoys me no end. Last year I ended up getting an iPhone as well and instead of converting my existing phone across I decided to put it on its own SIM card and run it through the TurboCap. This means I have two phones to feed, one that rotates on a two month basis (the Nokia) and another that requires a refresh every month. Compared to being able to let my credit lay around for nearly two years unmolested by the carrier (amazingly Telstra is on top for once) having to renew every month or lose it sounds strikingly like a plan where you decide how much you pay each month instead of being fixed into a specific dollar amount by the carrier. But I digress yet again and now with iPhone OS 3.0 tethering for the iPhone (that I already had with my N80) is now available. Of course I need to get Optus to enable it on my account, but again we’re back to being provided with a service and well I’m on prepaid. Some how Optus manage to limit tethering to just plan providers and you have to pay a further $10 for the privilege of using your own data in a different way. So being on a prepaid phone I don’t have access to the service.

As this is my second phone I’m half tempted to switch to another carrier because I have that freedom. I keep my Nokia because a) I don’t care about it as much now (I originally bought it in Singapore in a rather rapid one hour transit – one end of the airport to the other with this shop in between and some local cash acquisition; got every where I needed to go) and b) since a I can happily take it overseas, leave my iPhone at home and not worry about losing it (which would hurt more losing my Nokia; if I lost my Nokia I’d be tempted to get an Android phone – or maybe a Palm Pre to replace my existing Zire 31 that still lives on for the last 5 years now).

It would just be nice to be treated like a real customer. One of my other prepaid gripes is that they don’t have bills that you can easily review to see how much it really costs you but such is life.

Consider an all Microsoft shop who had never considered Linux before but wanted to virtualise their products. The best product to do this from what I can tell is the VMWare ESX platform which is really a small Linux hypervisor and then their own management tools underneath. The aim is that the end user never has to see the Linux back end they only see the graphical tools for Windows like Virtual Control Centre or the web based interfaces.  This leads me to the funny thought that a pure MS shop that had perhaps sworn off Linux might be deploying ESX because it is the best option out there (MS hasn’t brought out their solution yet, thats waiting on their Longhorn Server product), an entire Microsoft world virtualized under Linux.

It makes you wonder where the world is heading.

1. Put a HTML file on some web space (this didn’t work for me)
2. Set up a new DNS pointer for Google to find (this also didn’t work)
3. Just set up the DNS the way it needs to be (e.g. pointing things to ghs.google.com)

 The last one ended up being the solution for me even though it isn’t obvious when you first start off that things will work this way. Thankfully you can get things up and running without having to verify that you own the domain, just end up setting up your DNS to point to the right place solves things anyway. So what does Google give you?

• Mail – Their Google Mail product available on your domain, the main reason a lot of people will be deploying this solution.
• Calendar – Their calendar solution is integrated into the mail address book. Interestingly enough they don’t have the address book feature as another application which for building corporate address books might be handy, or linking into a website.
• Pages – Google Pages is perhaps one of the lesser known products in Google’s application stable, is a product similar to the old Homesite and Geocities products of old (before they sold out and had lots of ads, then people realised that doing everything manually most of the time was too much effort and they just wanted a template and WordPress did all they needed, or Joomla! did what they wanted better). I’ve used it since the early beta and this, like its brothers is stand alone as well.
• Docs and Spreadsheets – Again, the boon here is the integration with Mail’s address book application which means that you have the ability to share documents (and document control) with different people within your organisation. As an administrator you can also restrict documents to within the domain or allow users to share it externally, so this doesn’t make it less secure than other solutions for document sharing (still doesn’t stop users exporting it to another format and emailing it manually anyway).
• Chat – The final major application is Google’s XMPP powered IM solution, which again integrates into Mail’s address book to provide contact list management integrated with your contact list. This is available via the web browser standalone interfaces, your start page, within the Mail application or using a dedicted IM client such as Adium on the Mac, Google’s Talk application on Windows or the Gajim Jabber client or Pidgin on Linux. These chats can also be logged and are available in the Mail application as well.
• Start – Like the customised Google home page (iGoogle), this is provided as an option for your domain as well. Again it integrates with the rest of the products like Mail, Calendar, Talk and Docs to allow for a very functional first page to go to (more functional than most options I’ve seen around the place). Its heavy integration in a small way puts it at the functionality level of something like Microsoft’s Sharepoint style solution, however the Google solution is not customisable (unlike Sharepoint) however out of the box it enables users to see more information about their data (such as the Docs integration)

This was just a review of the standard edition, the premier edition (at $50/user/year) offers a few more interesting features such as optional ads, policy and message recovery, resource scheduling, single sign on and other user services (including a 10 GB mail box). As an option to a Microsoft powered world, some of the tools are better integrated and easier to use (collaboration and versioning is awesome in Google’s Docs product) however the simple problem is that when the network link goes down, so does your entire office productivity.Something to dwell on.

Stay tuned to read some of my experiences with technology and the world.

Sam