On Tuesday evening I attended the open house at Google in London to listen to Vint Cerf give a talk entitled, “Tracking the Internet into the 21st century”. Vint, as I like to call him, was one of the inventors of TCP/IP so he was well qualified to give a talk on the future direction of the Internet.

He talked about a number of things including a recent project he has been working on: the InterPlanetary Internet. Yes, it is what you think it is! What was interesting to hear were his thoughts on VOIP, something I have been looking at recently. He described it as “no big deal” then went on to explain why. He said that VOIP companies make most of their money from connecting online users to the PSTN, which is true; think Skype. He then argued that when everybody is online, or least all of those people you want to talk to are online, there will be no need to connect to the PSTN and therefore there will be no source of revenue. My thoughts on this are that he his right but that time is a long way off. The number of people on the Internet is growing rapidly but it will be a long time before everybody is online. I also think that there is money to be made from offering additional services such as voicemail etc. I also remember reading on a blog somewhere the suggestion that if VOIP companies can charge 1 cent a minute for connecting to the PSTN, they can offer calls for free and absorb the costs with revenue made from advertisements, one of Google’s main source of revenue.

At this point the notes I took are a bit sketchy but here are few other points worth mentioning:

• The Internet Governance Forum will meet for the first time in October of this year
• Asia will be the biggest group of Internet users
• He regretted not building authentication into TCP/IP, e.g. end-to-end authentication

Overall I enjoyed the talk. Google have nice offices too. It was supposed to be a recruitment drive but there was a distinct lack of Googlers around and the buffet wasn’t great either, although there was plenty of alcohol on tap! Yes I am hard to please, but maybe I’ll apply anyway 🙂

Now Yahoo is getting into the whole pay for email scheme but then that isn’t too surprising when you consider that, according to SpamHaus, Yahoo is the fourth worst spam service ISP. If they have that much spam going through their network and if they could charge for it, that’s a lot of money!

Alex wrote an interesting piece on his blog about how poorly Javascript supports writing thread-safe code.

Check out this video of Natalie Portman doing her impression of Eminem.

And finally, seeing as it was the Oscars last night, my award for the most irritating piece of software goes to ….. Microsoft Visio. It sucks!

Writing anything in Spanish on my Mac has always been a pain. It would help if I had a Spanish keyboard but I don’t. In my previous attempts I have always reverted to selecting the appropriate accented character from the character palette. It’s a slow process! However, I have just found out how it can be done using the keyboard. Here’s a brief list of some of the more common accented characters in Spanish and how to write them:

• Option key + e, release then “e” → é
• Option key + n, release then “n” → ñ
• Option key + e, release then “o” → ó
• Option key + Shift + “?” → ¿

Of course I use a Kinesis keyboard which doesn’t have the Option key, or any other Mac specific keys for that matter, so I have to keep leaning over to my laptop to get at the appropriate key(s) but it’s a start.

You can find more codes at this site.

I just came across this and I’m amazed! Apparently AOL has announced that it is prepared to accept payment for incoming emails. These certified emails will skip the usual spam filters and will be guaranteed delivery. I don’t see how this will decrease the amount of spam people receive, as AOL claim. With a two-tier system spammers that can afford to pay will pay and those that can’t, or won’t, will continue doing what they do now. What will be interesting to see is how AOL will decide what it will and won’t deliver, or will it just be sufficient for companies to hand over the cash in return for guaranteed delivery.

I have recently started to use Microsoft Word on my Mac but only because it appears that the rest of the working world seems to use it. Actually, if I’m honest, I quite like it. It’s much better than the Windows version but I digress. There is something about Word that irritates me: there doesn’t appear to be any facility to revert back to a previous version of a document. Sure I can track changes but that doesn’t seem to do want I want. As far as revision numbers go Word only seems to count how many times the document has been saved. Great, just what I don’t need!

Lets say that I save a document a couple of times but I want to revert back to how it was two saves ago because what I have written recently is wrong. How do I do this? Developers use source code management tools like Subversion or CVS to track changes in code. Is there similar functionality in Word? If not, why not? Currently I am keeping revisions of documents by appending a number at the end of the filename every time I save it. Very sophisticated I think you’ll agree! I’m not a Word guru so it’s possible that I may have missed something. Any help appreciated.

I was downloading the latest version of Firefox when I happened to notice where it was being downloaded from:

http://mirrors.playboy.com/mozilla//firefox/releases/1.5.0.1
/win32/en-GB/Firefox%20Setup%201.5.0.1.exe

Playboy and Firefox. What more does a web surfer need!

The Economist Intelligence Unit have just released their biannual report on the most expensive cities in the world to live. And the winner is: Oslo, Norway. Apparently it’s the first time Tokyo hasn’t topped the poll. Paris is the 4th most expensive city with London in 7th position. What surprised me was that New York, the most expensive city in the US according to the survey, is only 27th in the list! I thought it would have been a lot higher up.

Want to learn a language? Well you might as well learn something useful. Take a look at this table of the 30 most spoken languages in the world.

Guy Kawasaki:“Judge others by their intentions and yourself by your results. If you want to be at peace with the world, here’s what you should do. When you judge others, look at what they intended to do. When you judge yourself, look at what you’ve actually accomplished. This attitude is bound to keep you humble. By contrast, if you judge others by their accomplishments (which are usually shortfalls) and yourself by your intentions (which are usually lofty), you will be an angry, despised little man.”

This is good advice. Most people start of with good intentions but don’t necessarily accomplish everything they set out to achieve in the first place. It is humbling as Guy states to look at what you have accomplished (the past) as opposed to judging yourself by what you intend to do (the future). If your intentions are way up there in the stratosphere you are never going to achieve them and will never be happy. Be practical. Choose realistic goals and most importantly, aim to accomplish them.

Well that’s the end of my motivational sermon. You can read the whole of Guy’s article here.

Update: Here’s a good tip: take a look at your resume. Resumes are supposed to be a brief summary of what you have done so far. If you were a potential employer or The Inquisitor from Red Dwarf, would you be impressed with what you were reading?

I have just had my Hotmail account upgraded to the beta version of Live Mail. I haven’t tried it in Firefox yet, only Internet Explorer. I have played around with it a bit so here is a list features that I have come across so far that you don’t get with Hotmail:

• Search
• Autocomplete feature for the To field using email addresses from your contact list
• To delete a message you can simply drag it into the Deleted Items folder
• Separate message view pane. When you click on a message header it gets displayed in a separate pane on the right.
• Sent emails are now automatically copied to the Sent folder. Previously you had to check a box if you wanted a copy of the email saved.

It looks a lot better too. Search is the big thing that is now available but that’s hardly innovative is it. I do like the fact that I can opt out of the beta program and have my account reverted back to how it was. Overall my initial reaction is one of disappointment. It’s better than Hotmail but I was expecting more.

Update: I have just tried it in Firefox and it doesn’t work properly although they do display a message telling me this when I login. I can still read and send email so it’s not too bad.