Just in:

Dear Mr Cummins,

Thanks for submitting your Naked DSL application.

We are currently processing your application and expect that your service should be ready to use within 10 to 15 working days, subject to full service qualification.

Please take the time to review our Customer Relationship Agreement which is located at http://www.iinet.net.au/about/cra/

If you have any questions, please reply to this email or call us on 13 22 58.

Kind Regards,

The Support Team
support@iinet.net.au
13 22 58

10 - 15 working days, please tell me it aint so!! I am sure that this is just a ploy to keep me in the office longer!

Besides which.. how is my chumby supposed to operate with no internet connectivity??

I’ve joined up to do the Naked DSL trial with iiNet. The upgrade process itself is pretty simple but do expect a long period where you do not have any internet! My ADSL2+ service went down on Monday morning and I have been told to expect 10-15 days of no service until the Naked DSL comes into effect.

Why do I do it then I hear you asking? Well at the moment I am paying $69.95 for the service, $34.95 for the phone line rental and $9.95 for the VOIP service. Now with Naked DSL I just pay the one fee of $89.95 for a 30GB peak and 60GB offpeak quota. No more phone rental and the VOIP is included. That is a saving of $24.90 per month or $298.80 per year or $597.60 for the life of the contract. I get a bit obsessed with numbers I think.

Once it is in place I am sure it will be fine, but not having any internet now is really really annoying. Especially if it is going to take a couple of weeks to get it activated.

The art of paper bill folding (like to see them try with our plastic money!). Click on the link to see more.

I love the way that they incorporate the faces of the bills into the overall fold pattern.

My chumby is finally here (thanks Chris!) after a couple of months of anticipation. They aren’t on the full market yet but are available on an invitation-only basis to residents of the USA only. Thanks to a friend in San Jose, I was able to get my hands on a couple to play with in Australia.

The premise of a chumby sounds simple but I think promises a lot. Essentially it is a 3.5″ touch screen with stereo speakers, two USB ports and wi-fi. The wi-fi connectivity and the chumby site is quite important as I’ll get to in a bit. It is always on and gives you a neat way to cycle through all the widgets that you specify for a particular channel. I set up a default channel that just cycles through weather, a few birthdays and some facebook updates.

The chumby comes in quite an attractive canvas sack with the unit, a power cord (yes it is a 110 to 240 volt power supply!) and a sack of chumby charms (they are just some things to hang off the ring, kind of like mobile phone charms). Plug the chumby in and you get the welcome video that goes a little way to explain what it is and how it works. I just exited the video and after a simple calibration (for the touch screen) you can set the screen and the wi-fi access up.

Some people have noticed that the touch screen is not that great. I haven’t had any problems with it yet. I have noticed that on my black unit the screen protector that came with it had some white stenciling on it and when I lifted it off it flaked a little and left some transfer on the device itself. I can just scrape it off, not a huge problem.

Once you have internet connectivity it will immediately try to download the latest updates for it. I had a couple plus the control panel to download so that took a bit of time. They use bittorrent to upload the firmware which is a nice touch. However, I would like to know if the chumby itself will seed the software as some ISP’s in Australia will count that towards your download quota.

It’ll reset itself and then ask you to activate the chumby. You do this through the website and as soon as it has confirmation you can get going and start to define channels and widgets. It will then ask you to set up the time and location of the chumby which is a breeze.

Basically the widgets are all small web applications that are designed and developed through the chumby SDK. The unit itself has a light version of flash over its embedded linux. The great thing about it is that it is completely hackable and Chumby Industries have gone to great lengths to publish every detail about its circuitry and construction. I bought one so I could play with getting slimserver and streaming itunes over it. I also wanted a cooler alarm clock which it kind of does as well but that wasn’t the main priority.

Some of the widgets are quite fun and let you play with a variety of inputs on the device. One of my favourites is a widget called “Bad Bunny” which is a cigar smoking bunny rabit who curses you in French when you touch the screen. If you get tired of the curses you can slap him around a bit as well.

The device has a convenient night mode as well so you don’t have to stare at the bright screen all night long.

More as I play with it.. finding new widgets every day.

Don’t like how the stacks icons work in Leopard - try out these iconsets.

Simply unzip anywhere and drag the icon that you want on top of your stack and it will display with a nice drawer type effect.

Have a read of this article at Boing Boing. From the Freakanomics blog (Freakanomics has a blog?? awesome!!):

In the very near future, online poker may become a suckers’ game that humans won’t have a chance to win. Bots are quite scale-able and it will be virtually impossible to prohibit computer or computer-assisted online playing.

Poker sites are trying to assure customers that they will kick bots off their site and seize their assets. But unlike the statistical trail left by crude poker cheats at Absolute Poker, it is possible for bots to randomize their strategies and even hire individual humans to run them.

Ultimately the Albertus Polaris program and its offspring could be more effective than any Justice Department indictment in crippling the growth of online gambling. Indeed, our government might even think about subsidizing the development and use of these bots.

I remember bots being kicked off Counter-strike sites years ago. Humans will always find a way to cheat at games, it is just in our nature. I am not surprised that bots are now becoming sophisticated enough to be able to hold their own in a highly interactive game such as poker and that programmers are able to build in enough weaknesses into the bot’s game so that they are not detected.

Given that online poker is such a big business I could imagine that they would want to spend a bit of money protecting their market - perhaps online turing tests before they can play? But if the bot can hire a human to do the test for them then that is negated. Perhaps they need to be hooked up to an ECG monitor? Again easily faked.. so it begs the question, how can you tell if that person on the other end of the connection really is a legitimate, human player?

I love this shit.. check out this post by Mary Jo Foley of zdnet titled “It’s payback time: If the Vista team could write ad copy …”. She claims:

Even typically staunch Mac backers are admitting that Apple’s new Leopard operating system is not perfect. It might even be as problem-prone (if not more so) as Windows Vista. Could Leopard go so far as to drive some switchers into Vista’s arms?

She quotes one issue where time machine is losing data for a particular brand of drive and states that it will drive droves of mac users straight into Vista’s tentacled grip.

I don’t know which planet she is coming from. Granted I don’t know many people who have had the balls to switch on Vista on their personal systems let alone run them loose on the corporate network but two of my colleagues have had Vista thrust onto them thanks to new laptop refreshes - and have had nothing but problems. Corrupt file systems, cannot remove “optional” installs like Symantec (which is so far embedded into the machine that it will try to reboot itself from the bios), folder structures that unlink themselves from the parent, disappearing menus and occasions where the Outlook just loses all of its menu bars.

Compare that to the problems that I have had with Leopard. Ok, I had to disable the application enhancer when I upgraded my laptop - but that was it. Everything runs fine even my Cisco VPN software which was the first thing that broke under Tiger. I find that applications are snappier and I even like Time Machine. People have had problems where the icons for the dock bar are not sticking but I find that a minor annoyance relative to what Vista did to my colleagues machines.

I consider myself reasonably savvy when it comes to windows/mac operating systems but even I wouldn’t care to try tackling Vista after seeing what they have been through. However I will recommend that people that I know give Leopard a go. Not sure if I could name any of the 300+ features that they tout but certainly the ones that I use every day I would highly recommend to people thinking of doing the upgrade.