Lunch Shoppe

In light of my reading on Foucault and his views on power and knowledge and the discourse of power I want apply what I have learned to how we use technology. Ten years ago we were not so dependent on the technologies we now take for granted. Internet, cell phones and social networks have broken open our lives and changed how we communicate, act and have thrown our lives into the public spotlight.

Cell phones allow us to easily be tracked while at the same time giving us a convenience. Smart phones may give us a map of where we are, but at the same time it also gives whoever wants to track us the means to map where we are. We have entered a discourse where the popularity of the phone made it a legitimate medium to track us. We can not use cell phones to prevent surveillance, but the way that we have become dependent on cell phones is essentially what traps us.

Further, we are entering another discourse with social networks. When all our friends are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. we also feel compelled to join those services. However, when we join those services we are constantly posting information, creating new modes of knowledge gathering. Social networking is a double edged sword insofar as we have the ability to connect with our friends, but at the same time we also give information about ourselves to groups which we might otherwise not want to give information to.

In both these cases the power of these services isn't absolute. We don't need to have a cell phone and we don't need to be on social networks, but we are stuck. Communication and social connections are tied heavily with having a cell phone where plans change on the whim due to the instant communication which occurs. Sure we can not have a cell phone, but to do so is essentially frowned upon to such an extent that we are coerced into submitting. (Think about this how you think of people who don't have cell phones? What is your personal feelings if you want to reach them?) Remember, this is not an absolute power, this is a discourse that has been created with multiple knowledges: the means of communication, how you view someone who does not have a cell phone, how society at large treats the use of the phone, etc. You are part of the discourse and you have freedom as part of this discourse, but in most likelihood you will likely be coerced into having a cellphone, even if you may not want it.

We are going to be entering that stage with social networks. Having a social network account be it Facebook, Twitter, etc. is going to become so great that we will be coerced into having an account. This is the underlying discourse that is happening right now in the fight of the social networks. How can we get more people to sign up for social networks? The answer is by making the connection to the network so strong that trying to resist and not become part of the network becomes difficult. People I know who left Facebook a year or two ago would come back to the network after a month or two because of the power of belonging to it. Now, if you ask most college students most if not all will have Facebook accounts.

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Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame "reported" that he is quitting the iPhone. I agree with some of his points, the debicle of pulling applications that developers worked hard to create has been extraordinarily bad. The iPhone is a great device, however, it is a walled garden where you have to play by Apple's rules or otherwise not play at all. However, pulling apps for an arbitrary reasons is not a way to gain developer clout. Right now people love the iPhone due to the many amazing applications you find on it even with the many limitations that have only recently been addressed. If Apple wants to keep that good will they have to be nice to the developers otherwise they will simply move to other platforms.

Frankly, Google is doing great with the Android even if there are not many devices to run the actual operating system yet. But with Motorola, HTC, Dell, Asus, etc backing the operating system it is going to be a force to be reconed with once the devices come out. It has also made it such that it has opened up the whole device to modification where even the dialer can be modified. That can't be said of the iPhone at all. Apple seems to be reversing the Mac vs Windows war of the 80s. Will Apple ever learn? I love my Mac and I love my iPhone, but that doesn't mean I will not switch when it is time to replace my hardware and right now whenever I change my phone in the distant future I don't think it will be an iPhone.

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Here is a screenshot of the latest build of Mac Chrome. It is coming up quite well it seems. Just needs Flash to make me use it regularly...

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Native Client seems like pretty cool technology. The way you can use Native Client Web Workers is pretty cool. You can have a frontend running in JavaScript with calls to NativeClient Web Workers for the heavy lifting.
 

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I am using the browser uzbl which adherits to the unix philosophy of KISS. It is a bit buggy, but otherwise quite usable. I can see this being used for such things as automation. I am currently using uzbl with awesome wm and I must say that it is a cool combination.

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Just watched the video demoing Google Wave and I must say I'm pretty excited about its possibilities. The ability to work in realtime with others, along with the ability to have federations of these on your own servers will do wonders for productivity and importantly insuring security.

Think of how business processes can be improved by this. Instead of going out to various sites and creating completely new credentials one can do everything within the wave client itself.

As a student this has several benefits for me:

• I can work on projects in real time with classmates.
• Taking notes would be a lot better as multiple people can possibly work in realtime. And working on the same document at once will likely make collaboration for studying easier especially when making study sheets and outlines.

• If I have a spec that is constantly changing I can work on the same wave with the clients. So if I do some changes to a product and update the wave the client can know and if they want it done differently I can view that immediately. This is better than the current route where I might get separate emails about a project that I will likely have to deal with or might even have to login to a separate disconnected service. Another problem that can go away is say you use a project management tool, but your client uses email. You can automatically connect the two especially with the gadget api.
  
• Bugs and Feature tracking becomes easier. The way I work I like to initially write down all the features I want and once I start working on the individual features I like to flush out what I need to do to get the feature done. With waves I can have a page full of features I might want to work on and when ready break the features into pieces to work on adding the information that needs to done to finish it. Plus adding collaborators will make finishing features and collaborating on changes and discussing them a whole lot easier.
  

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Apple is set to announce about its upcoming OS 3.0 for the iPhone. There are a few things I really want which I thought I'd write since I am procrastinating studying for my midterm.

• Background apps - I really want to listen to Pandora while at the same time sending and receiving SMSes without the radio going off. Is that so hard to ask?
• MMS - I think it'd make the whole communicating thing a lot fluid as I'll probably be much more likely to take pictures and send them to people since I tend to be a visual person anyways. The whole email thing is sort of out of the way.
• Copy and Paste - Seriously? It's so annoying, for example, to find a song on Shazam wanting to send the name to a friend only to realize that you have to write down the name on a paper then send it by retyping it, good luck remembering a complicated foreign song title when you don't have a pen at hand. Seriously what century are we in? Come on Apple!
• Tethering - Not a biggie, but would be nice especially since I'm giving AT&T $30 bucks for a shitty 3G connection that barely works if at all. Then again tethering would probably cripple the already bad network or force them to upgrade, but I'm betting on the former.

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I got calls to be cheaper in the US and saved a bunch of money for my parents by switching them to Skype To Go for local calls. But what to do about calls to India?We have a lot of family in India who my parents tend to call often. Right now they use callingcards which are not the cheapest and have all these connection fees associated with them and Skype is pretty expensive in its calls to India costing nearly $0.09 a minute. So I wanted to find a solution to this problem with my newfound knowledge of VOIP technology. I was thinking of setting up a VOIP switch with a cheap DID and routing calls through that to bridge calls to India except they would have to talk for about 2 hours before the actual calls would start to become cheaper. Initially this seemed like a good deal since 2 hours isn't that much time. I was set to do this since it seemed like a great way to learn about VOIP and cut costs. It consisted of creating a mini callingcard IVR. I setup FreeSwitch with a cheap DID number from Callcentric, and bridge the call with Gafachi (their rates are pretty cheap). This resulted in Costs = $2.95 + ~$0.024 x minutes per month. This was better than Costs = ~$0.05 x minutes. However, this requires a lot of work on my part. I need to buy the minutes every so often, make sure the server is not on the fritz, and make sure my IVR works as intended. This is where opportunity cost becomes important. I can learn a bunch about VOIP and how those systems work, it's pretty interesting, but at the end of the day I just need something that works and gives my parents cheap calls to India. So I signed up for this service called IndiaMinutes which seems to be reselling Gafachi, it has a simple UI and a dial through number. This means I can just set it up and let my parents use it as they need. Plus, the Cost = ~$0.024 x minutes which means that it is already a couple dollars cheaper per month than my solution. Further, it has an ability to top up when funds run low so minimum supervision required. In general it seems to be a good cheap solution to call India. So I just setup their number in my parents Skype to Go speed dial to call India. We'll see how they end up liking it and using it.

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I decided to sell some of my old textbooks which I see no value in keeping for the future. I ran into a choice when going about this (like most things in life). Should I use half.com or Amazon? Initially, I was using half.com and it seemed like the way to go. I mean they have a commission that slides down from 15% as the price of the book increases. They also have no flat or variable fee for selling. However, unfortunately it seems that eBay, which owns half.com, has abandoned working on the site. There is a complete lack of information about the books that are being sold and the site just feels like another marketplace, not really a place to buy books. Therefore, I decided to use Amazon even though they have a commission of 15% regardless of price and charge $0.99 flat fee plus a $1.70 variable fee. However, the benefits of the site outweigh the costs as the site is a dedicated bookstore with thought given to the seller. The maintenance tools don't seem like they've been last touched somewhere between 2005 and the 90's. It overall has a simpler and more professional interface. Plus, I would wager that people are more likely to go to Amazon to find books before they ever touch half.com so the likelihood of someone buying from the site is much greater than half.com. So what does all this mean? If you need one of my old textbooks please consider buying from Abhi's Books.

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Being a product of the web/mobile/text messaging generation, landlines are a bit of a mystery. They are phones people have at their homes, people call from them, but why are these antiquated things still around? In the land of cell phones why are those things even used. I decided to take a look and decided to put it on a diet at home, an extreme diet actually though not a diet that will lead to death. So my parents had this $60 a month plan with AT&T called All Distance (meaning as far as the borders of the US... I guess AT&T has a patriotic meaning for all, false advertising suit anyone? I'm looking at you pre-law friends of mine) which provided all the wonderful features one would expect on a modern day cell phone on a land phone. But the pricing scheme is off the fucking roof especially since it's only $20 bucks lower than the cell phone bill. Also, looking at the bills for the last 6 months (at least they got the website right... when it's up) I saw that they barely made 40 calls a month on the service. I told my parents to go basic and get the cheapest plan possible since we usually only get incoming calls not really outgoing. This automagically cut the cost of our bill by $45 bucks! So I was looking around their site and saw the "features" I could add to the phone line and was struck by how expensive it was. $15 bucks for CallerID! Are you fucking kidding me? I can get a fucking SIP provider who will not only provide a DID number with all the bells and whistles that these bastards are charging ridiculous amounts for less than they are charging for a basic plan! My research continued a bit further. So what was the state of our cell phone? We have AT&T Wireless (I love my iPhone) and realized we were not using all of our minutes (hell we have about 10,000 rollover minutes with like a 1000 expiring every month) so I told my parents to start using the cell phone more. Your probably thinking, "You told them what? Are you mad?" Yes, I know it was unusual advice. Yes, I know I could have just gone to the lower tier rate and cut a further $20, but with almost $45 saved on landline bills and with how much my mom has her cell phone with her anyways on my parents long drive to their second store it was a fair call... no pun intended. My voice usage oddly enough coincide with the evening and weekends when calls are free so I don't have many minutes used during the day (ah... college). Since we have enough minutes to last a recession using the cell phone a bit more is not a problem. So what about the landphone why even keep it then? It seems a bit useless if I told my parents to just use the cell phone a bit more. Well since we did have it and local calls are free and I started liking Skype (ykabhinav... call me) so I got the $30 a year unlimited US & Canada subscription and setup Skype to Go on the home phone. Since my parents are used to the nuances of Calling Cards anyways it is not much of a hassle for them to call Skype and bridge the call. I even set it up so that it just dials through Skype in the address book. So what did we do with the savings? Well my dad spend $5 bucks more to get faster internet at home and I spend $10 bucks more to get unlimited family text messaging, after all my sister is growing up and she needs texting as much as I do. And I figured might as well teach the parents a bit about modern day convieniences where not everything requires a call... (Sent some info to my dad about BofA which he was asking about yesterday, he replied, "Ok." My father's first text message...). Update: After using Skype for a couple more weeks my parents have gotten rid of all but the minimal service at their store thus saving them even more per year. If people were to do this at this rate it would seem that the landline business is pretty dire.

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