T-Mobile launches BlackBerry 8820 with WiFi – Engadget Mobile

T-Mobile launches BlackBerry 8820 with WiFi – Engadget Mobile

Looks like I may actually finally be leaving the PalmOS world. This new BlackBerry with both GPS and WiFi is just hard to compete with. The only thing missing is a touch screen… ah the touch screen… well I guess I could live with out it… then again… well Lauren did say that she would get me a new phone for my birthday which was last Friday…. so I think it may be time… I’ll have to do some price research but then I think I’m switching.

Touch-tone calling systems

Have you ever called a company support line and found yourself looking at your phone with every option? Well I got off the phone with Costco's Pharmacy and was surprised to find that all options ignored the center row of numbers… Basically all options were 'press 1' or 3 no 2. Smart move, it is a lot easier to press the outside buttons than the inside….

Yahoo’s possible Marriage with Microsoft

While the debate is definitely heating…. This is probably one of the biggest things to happen in the web world since…. well for many out there this is probably the biggest. As for me… well my concern is not whether or not it happens, but what to do with all my Yahoo accounts. The way I see it, there 4 possible outcomes:

1. Yahoo gets bought by (merges with) Microsoft
2. Yahoo get acquired by another
3. Yahoo stays itself and survives
4. Yahoo stays itself and has a slow death

While the 4th options is very unlikely it is always a possibility. My guess is one of the first 2. That all said, I’ve got various accounts with various parts of yahoo. I’ve had my mail account since 1996/7 when I wanted an account to keep in touch with my High School friends as we all went to college, I had a Photo account when it opened and now a Flickr Pro account, I have an extensive Del.icio.us account with countless bookmarks. So what should I do. Do I stay or do I go (no please don’t start singing). The truth is I don’t want to go, but I refuse to have an account with a Microsoft controlled company. While I think MS Office is debately one of the best office packages ever written, I’m not a fan of the OS and much of the histortical mentality. I know that over the past few years they’ve made many headways into the open and opensource world. I know that internally they are a different beast than we see on the outside, and that is a much nicer animal, not a worse, but still I’ve been an ‘anything-but-windows’ guy for too long. So lets evaluate my options for each:

Mail:
Yahoo Mail: I love Yahoo Mail. I like the control I have over it. In my mind it is probably the closest relation to a standalone client available.

• MSN/Hotmail: I have disliked it ever since they came into existence, I fear that if MS gets their hands on Yahoo Mail…
• Google GMail: while I like many thing Google has created, Mail and Reader are two things I can do without. They are great products, just not for me
• AOL: well… can’t say much about it, I know Lauren still uses her AOL account… I created one a few years back but never really used it, it seems good, but don’t know much about it for sure.
• ISP: well I don’t think I’ll ever do this one since they tend to change to often whether it be by merger/acquisition or by moving.
• Other: I know there have to be other solutions but at this point not sure, recommendations?

Bookmarks Del.icio.us:
Well first off, they are the only product I’ve tried of this nature, never looked elsewhere. I like the way it works and it has met my needs. My hope is that MS (or another) will leave it alone much the way that Yahoo! has over the years.

• Other options: suggestions?

Flickr:
Again like Del.icio.us, all I can hope is that if and whoever acquires Yahoo that they leave it alone. Yahoo learned quickly that Yahoo Photos could never be mergers of setup to absorb Flickr, thankfully they simply shut the Yahoo Photo service down and kept Flickr.

• Picasa: from Google. I think it is a great product, I like the standalone client and the openness of it. I could move to it.
• Photobucket: I hear great things, I know many who use it, but it is not free (of course I pay for a Flickr Pro account)
• Kodak/Shutterfly/etc… well these are all good sites
• suggestions?

Well with the exception of my lack of knowledge of Del.icio.us competitors, Google definitely has the upper-hand on competitive products, but then again my primary need is an email client… and well… Picasa, well that is probably a hands down answer. So what to do…

Well my hope is that Yahoo saves itself, but only time will tell… and if the current track… I can hope that MS recognizes that the whole reason that they are going the route of trying to acquire Yahoo, is because they suck at the web. They rock the desktop (not mine, but they have that market down), but the web, they just can’t cut it. So okay, buy/acquire/merge with Yahoo, keep two head quarters, and keep it as two seperate entities… Think Altria… two separate entities of PhilipMorriss and Kraft (yes I know Kraft has been spun off but the model)…. Oh well again all I can say… Time will Tell.

Yahoo’s possible Marriage with Microsoft

While the debate is definitely heating…. This is probably one of the biggest things to happen in the web world since…. well for many out there this is probably the biggest. As for me… well my concern is not whether or not it happens, but what to do with all my Yahoo accounts. The way I see it, there 4 possible outcomes:

1. Yahoo gets bought by (merges with) Microsoft
2. Yahoo get acquired by another
3. Yahoo stays itself and survives
4. Yahoo stays itself and has a slow death

While the 4th options is very unlikely it is always a possibility. My guess is one of the first 2. That all said, I’ve got various accounts with various parts of yahoo. I’ve had my mail account since 1996/7 when I wanted an account to keep in touch with my High School friends as we all went to college, I had a Photo account when it opened and now a Flickr Pro account, I have an extensive Del.icio.us account with countless bookmarks. So what should I do. Do I stay or do I go (no please don’t start singing). The truth is I don’t want to go, but I refuse to have an account with a Microsoft controlled company. While I think MS Office is debately one of the best office packages ever written, I’m not a fan of the OS and much of the histortical mentality. I know that over the past few years they’ve made many headways into the open and opensource world. I know that internally they are a different beast than we see on the outside, and that is a much nicer animal, not a worse, but still I’ve been an ‘anything-but-windows’ guy for too long. So lets evaluate my options for each:

Mail:
Yahoo Mail: I love Yahoo Mail. I like the control I have over it. In my mind it is probably the closest relation to a standalone client available.

• MSN/Hotmail: I have disliked it ever since they came into existence, I fear that if MS gets their hands on Yahoo Mail…
• Google GMail: while I like many thing Google has created, Mail and Reader are two things I can do without. They are great products, just not for me
• AOL: well… can’t say much about it, I know Lauren still uses her AOL account… I created one a few years back but never really used it, it seems good, but don’t know much about it for sure.
• ISP: well I don’t think I’ll ever do this one since they tend to change to often whether it be by merger/acquisition or by moving.
• Other: I know there have to be other solutions but at this point not sure, recommendations?

Bookmarks Del.icio.us:
Well first off, they are the only product I’ve tried of this nature, never looked elsewhere. I like the way it works and it has met my needs. My hope is that MS (or another) will leave it alone much the way that Yahoo! has over the years.

• Other options: suggestions?

Flickr:
Again like Del.icio.us, all I can hope is that if and whoever acquires Yahoo that they leave it alone. Yahoo learned quickly that Yahoo Photos could never be mergers of setup to absorb Flickr, thankfully they simply shut the Yahoo Photo service down and kept Flickr.

• Picasa: from Google. I think it is a great product, I like the standalone client and the openness of it. I could move to it.
• Photobucket: I hear great things, I know many who use it, but it is not free (of course I pay for a Flickr Pro account)
• Kodak/Shutterfly/etc… well these are all good sites
• suggestions?

Well with the exception of my lack of knowledge of Del.icio.us competitors, Google definitely has the upper-hand on competitive products, but then again my primary need is an email client… and well… Picasa, well that is probably a hands down answer. So what to do…

Well my hope is that Yahoo saves itself, but only time will tell… and if the current track… I can hope that MS recognizes that the whole reason that they are going the route of trying to acquire Yahoo, is because they suck at the web. They rock the desktop (not mine, but they have that market down), but the web, they just can’t cut it. So okay, buy/acquire/merge with Yahoo, keep two head quarters, and keep it as two seperate entities… Think Altria… two separate entities of PhilipMorriss and Kraft (yes I know Kraft has been spun off but the model)…. Oh well again all I can say… Time will Tell.

SSH and Permissions

I just spent the better part of the last 2 days working on setting up SSH with private/public shared keys. I’ve done this many a times so I launched my nifty file containing the documentation I’ve used in the past and went to work. I first made my key pairs on both machines, and then I transfered the file to there respective sides. The connection for hostA to hostB worked flawlessly from the first instance, now hostB to hostA was another story. Of course the first thing I did was check the permissions:

hostA:> chmod 700 ~user1/.ssh
hostA:> chmod 600 ~user1/.ssh/*

and tried again… still did not work. Next I checked the /etc/ssh/sshd_config , everything looked fine and actually when diff’d with the one on the other server, they were identical. I should mention that hostB is a Redhat ES 4.4 server and hostA is Centos 4.4 server (basically identical). Well I scratched my head and went to google. Of course every forum and mailing list result I found said: “check the permissions”. Well I did it again….. and again… and again…. still no luck. This is when I decided to try a different user.
hostA:> chmod 700 ~user2/.ssh
hostA:> chmod 600 ~user2/.ssh/*
And guess what…. it worked. this is when it hit me. the actuall directory structure. The typical hierarchy looks like this:
owner path
root /home
user1 /home/user1
user2 /home/user2

but this was my hierarchy:
owner path
root /home
user2 /home/user2
user1 /home/user2/user1

All I can figure is that since the parent to the users home was not owned by root, SSH didn’t work. Solution:

owner path
root /home
user2 /home/user2
user1 /home/user1

ln -s /home/user1 home/user2/user1

Argh…. 2 days wasted and while I swore it was not permissions, it was just under the name “ownership”. All because for layout reasons I want the home directory of one user with in the other.

GTalk and International Chatting

Well I just have to give a quick shout out to Google’s GTalk. First I must say this, I have a gtalk account a yahoomessenger account and even an AIM account. By far I’m enjoying gtalk over all of them. My brothers are not the most up2date with the technical protocols of the internet, so they don’t necessarily understand the greatness that Gtalk is using Jabber. anyways….. to make a long story short… Gtalk = Jabber = excellent group chat even across the pond. Both my older brother and I are still in Miami, and our younger brother is sitting in Wales at UWC’s Atlantic College. We’ve had many an international group chats via the various jabber sites mostly conference.ursine.ca since it is the default via Meebo an excellent online based multi-client chat package. It made my life tremendously easier when setting up group chat via jabber for my brothers. Back to the international element… via gtalk, I keep in touch with my brother in Wales and my friend in Jordan… my brother in Wales uses it to talk to people all over the world at other UWCs and all his friends still in Miami. I tried using Yahoo to talk over the pond…. never been very good (for me at least), I know alot of user use MSN to talk over sees, but lets see MS or Google which one would you use? I’ll stick with Google, I’m a Mac/Linux user, no MS on my platform.

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