milliAmp

Tom and I have decided to move all of our sites from our hosting at StartLogic to something a little more reliable. We decided to give MediaTemple‘s Grid-Service a go. I’ve been trying to get all our sites migrated over but because we want as little disruption as possible we needed everything that was running currently documented.

So far it has been fun, this site has been running from the new system for a couple of weeks now and I haven’t noticed anything that isn’t working and the control panel is great for a pseudo-shared-hosting control panel.

My workplace Evos has been using MediaTemple for over a year now and we’ve only had great customer service and awesome uptimes so we didn’t have any qualms about switching over.

I’m not a fan Hannah Montana but this caught my eye. The director of Step Up 2: The Streets issued a dance-off challenge to Miley Cyrus (who plays Hannah Montana) and Mandy Jiroux who produce the “Miley and Mandy show” on YouTube.

Whether the idea was conceived as a marketing stunt or not, it certainly has a lot of followers now.

If you like Hip-hop dancing, check out these videos on Youtube:

By now you must have heard the noise about Vodafone New Zealand‘s announcement of their iPhone 3G Plans.

What a lot of people are saying is that compared to international prices, these plan details are extortionate. Vodafone have made the point that their plans compare with what is on the market in New Zealand already but that doesn’t seem good enough.

A Vodafone Marketing representative got monstered on Campbell Live last night in typical John Campbell fashion. I don’t think the guy completely expected John Campbell to have complete listings of the plans available to iPhone customers from all over the world right in front of him. The guy had to stick to “we are offering a range of plans” that “represent great value” for New Zealand customers.

Vodafone also mentioned that the upfront cost for the handset on their cheapest plan is comparable to the price of an iPod Touch. Currently in the USA, the iPod Touch is more expensive than the iPhone. You normally expect a handset-subsidy when you sign up on a long contract and that point was basically saying that on the $80 a month plan you get no subsidy.

I was waiting out to see these prices to decide whether I’d get an iPhone. The announcement in the US of such cheap prices gave me a little glimmer of hope when Vodafone announced they would also offer the iPhone from as low as $199. The catch is that to get the phone for $199, you have to sign up for a 24 month contract at $250 a month. This includes 1GB of internet traffic and 600 minutes as well as 600 text messages but comparing to plans overseas it falls far short as most countries offer a plan cheaper far cheaper than that which includes unlimited traffic.

Unfortunately, I won’t be getting one in the near future. Public pressure has caused a Swiss provider to alter their iPhone plans, we’ll see if the consumer attitude is similar in New Zealand. I hope Vodafone have shot themselves in the foot. They had the potential to murder the market share statistics by getting a bunch of people who haven’t yet had a PDA or cell phone into the market by making this device affordable, similar to what has happened in the US but it appears they’ve lost that chance. It would have been perfect considering Telecom’s imminent entry into the UMTS world.

You can buy the iPhone from Vodafone without a contract by visiting a Vodafone store but the 8GB model will cost you $979 and the 16GB model $1129. However you apparently won’t be able to access the internet via the Vodafone network without a Mobile Broadband contract.

Also, visual voicemail will not be available from launch in New Zealand and you apparently cannot use an iPhone on Prepay.

Oh well.

It turns out you can use the iPhone on Vodafone’s existing on account plans as long as you have a mobile broadband plan. This means you can get an iPhone for $849 on a plan which includes 200MB Data ($0.50/mb overage charge), 40 text messages, 20 anytime minutes and 60 off-peak minutes for $48.90. This may be appropriate for those who want to only use their iPhone occasionally. This plan is the Mobilise 200 + YouChoose Base plan.

I just had to write about this because it frustrates me a lot every time I run into this. It is these new-fangled heat-sealed packages a lot of electronic gadgets are coming in now. You can’t get them open with practically destroying the entire packaging. I don’t want to go and find a pair of scissors or a knife to get into my new gadgets. I also don’t want to slip with said cutting device and cut a cable or the manual. Some headphones I bought a few months ago had this heat-sealed packages and the edges were dangerously close to where the cable ran inside the packet.

I am a box-hoarder. I keep boxes for my gadgets for at least a year after I buy them, in case it breaks in the first couple of weeks, in case I want to sell it; I can sell it in the original packaging and if it wasn’t bought locally, some retailers request that you send it back in the original packaging. So, I keep boxes. It frustrates me that the packaging for these devices has to be destroyed to get into the thing.

It means that if it doesn’t work for the purpose I need it to and want to return it to the shop two days later, they can’t put it back on the shelf for full price because the whole thing it ripped apart and it means I can’t offer it to someone to buy later in the original packaging (well I guess I could but with it being in pieces, it distracts from the point of doing that).

Does anyone else have a problem with this nasty packaging or is it just me?

Last Thursday afternoon, a close friend of mine gave me a call to ask whether a discounted price he had seen for an iPod Touch was a good deal or not. He was pretty keen on getting an iPod Touch even though the iPhone 2.0 is released in a couple of weeks but he seemed pretty set and doesn’t have a need for another cellphone as his work supplies one for his use.

They don’t currently have a wireless network at their house and seeing as the iPod Touch has wi-fi capability we ended up discussing that I was interesting in selling my current Airport Express Wireless G base-station to upgrade my infrastructure to Wireless-N.

The main reason I wanted to upgrade was actually to have an Airport Extreme Base Station which would allow me to share both printers and also a couple of hard-drives over the wireless. The Airport Express only supports one printer and no hard-drives so I have had to switch USB cables around to print to the other printer in the past.

So, knowing that he was keen for that deal, I went out and purchased a new Airport Extreme Base Stations with Wireless-N and Gigabit ethernet. I also picked up a new Wireless-N capable Airport Express so that I could once again stream music to our downstairs speakers.

My next mission was obviously to map out how I wanted to set up the network and the devices. I love setting up network infrastructure, I don’t purport to say I’m any good at it at all but I find it a hell of a lot of fun.

I plan to sprinkle this blog post with diagrams of the old set-up and the new set-up but my laptop is currently at the shop getting its iSight looked at and I’m using a user-account on Aimee‘s laptop which doesn’t have anything that I can easily draw diagrams in. For now I’ll add a textual description.

My network consisted of:

• An ADSL Modem/Router for internet connectivity
• A LinkSys VOIP to POTS adapter, for use with our Xnet Fusion VOIP account
• An Apple Mac Mini, connected in the lounge for entertainment purposes
• Two Apple MacBook Pro Laptops
• An Apple Airport Express, currently in use only as a base station since we moved to our new house

Then I added:

• An Apple Airport Extreme Base Station
• A new Apple Airport Express

And I’ve packed up the old Airport Express.

I wanted to add to the network

• My Laser printer
• My inkjet Printer
• My 2-disk RAID enclosure
• Possibly a couple more hard-drives for laptop back-up purposes.

There are a couple of restrictions this placed on the network. For internal network QoS, the Linksys VOIP Adapter needs to be placed between the router and the network so that voice traffic gets injected right at the router. This also means that our cordless phone and corded phone need to be connected within a few meters of that adapter.

The RAID enclosure isn’t network capable so it needs to be connected  with a meter or so of the Airport Extreme Base Station. As do the printers.

Also, the only two locations in the entire house with a phone plug are the kitchen/dining area and the master bedroom.

So I went ahead and picked out a possible solution. It all works pretty well.

I went the whole hog and set up my Wireless-N network on the 5GHz frequency using wide-channels to get maximum possible throughput. We don’t have any 802.11b or g devices in the house (or so I thought) and I doubt anyone in our close proximity has a 5GHz network set up so all was well.

I have the router in the master bedroom and an ethernet cable running from that into our work room. In there is the Base Station, the hard-drives, the printers and the VOIP adapter attached to the cordless phone base.

Downstairs I have the Airport Express and the Mac Mini. As I eluded to above, it turns out that the Mac Mini isn’t Wireless-N capable as I thought it was, it only supports 802.11b and 802.11g so it ended up being connected via gigabit to the new Airport Express as they’re right next to each other anyway. The Express is currently connected to the Base Station using WDS.

I had a fun time setting up the printers. I decided to stretch USB to the limits and see how far away I could keep the printers from the base station. It turns out it is 7 meters keeping to the skirting board to the first printer and another 3 meters to the second where they are placed quite conveniently now. There is a maximum length of 5 meters between devices  so I pulled out an old USB Active Extension cable, then plugged in a  2 meters of USB extension, followed by a USB hub and then plugged the first printer in using a short cable and used a 3 meter cable to reach to the other printer.

I thought I had all my numbers worked out but for some reason, the base stations wasn’t recognising either of the printers! I played around a little and found that the base station didn’t like the active extension cable plugged into it, but it didn’t mind having a hub first and then the active extension so I went down that road. Turns out I would have had to add that initial hub anyway to plug in the hard drives next to the base station so all is well.

I wasn’t particularly pleased with the file transfer throughput so I ended up playing around with WDS, wide-channels, different frequencies and even forcing the base station down to wireless-g to see if I could find out what was happening.

I’m just finishing up testing the network performance using the various settings which I’ll post about at a later stage.