Interesting view from US reporter visiting Toronto recently:

I felt in some strange way that I was leaving the kind of place that, at least in spirit, the U.S. had been in another time — prior to colour-coded alerts, scenes of towers crumbling, midnight anti-terror laws and everywhere the pervasive selling of fear and vigilance. I could almost feel that fear leave me crossing the bridge to Sarnia and returning in some fashion, crossing to Niagara Falls, New York.

Interesting little device that I can see taking off with kids as Linux Devices points out:

Aeronix used Linux to build a $99 instant messenger appliance aimed at keeping kids from tying up the family PC while chatting with friends. Naturally, hackers soon appropriated the device for other duties, such as remotely controlling/monitoring Sony's Aibo robot. (source: Linux Devices)

I wrote about Linksys and their declining customer service in the past but this time its about their anti-competitive practices.

Just recently I purchased a Linksys PAP2 VoIP adapter thinking I could use it to connect to my VoIP provider. It does say on the box that it is a Vonage start-up kit but nowhere does it say that one requires service from Vonage. It only makes mention that if you sign-up with Vonage you'll get a discount of some sorts.

After trying to get this thing to work and researching a bit on the net I discovered that Linksys used to sell a version of this same device without it being tied down to Vonage. However, Vonage must have put enough money in their pockets to convince them to pull it. You can't find it anywhere. Vonage must have also put enough money into Linksys pockets to go out and buy Sipura. The Linksys PAP2 is actually a Sipura SPA 2000 I believe. At one point Linksys licensed the technology but now they gobbled up Sipura so they can probably pull their products from the market as well.

I'm finding it almost impossible to find a decent device like the Sipura SPA 2000. Its ridiculous what is going on in this industry with service providers trying to tie you to their service and give you no choice whatsoever.

Since the Sipura looks to be the best product for what I need out there I might bite the bullet and just purchase it. If it disappears as a product or support falls of the planet due to Linksys at least it will give me a couple years of good use I hope.

No wonder SipPhone sued them. I believe they won the case. I'm 100% behind them.

In light of this I'm seriously considering whether I'll ever again buy a Linksys product for myself, my companies and any clients.

Well, here we go again. I was beginning to wonder why traffic to koSmo.com was larger than normal for people looking for koZmo.com. Just when I was going to remove references to KoZmo from the website as well.

A google search for koZmo and koSmo show 609 results. Doesn't surprise me. Look at how many articles use both spellings. Unbelievable.

I'll likely get more visits to kosmo.com than MaxDelivery just from people remembering the old name!!!

Previous posts about KoZmo are here, here and here.

The Wired article.

From Techdirt:

Back in the heyday, Kozmo.com was a part of an era of convenience funded largely by ambitious VCs. Though it certainly was nice to have DVDs and orange juice delivered within the hour, Kozmo's refusal to charge delivery fees and overexpansion doomed it to be one of the dotcom bubble burst poster children. Well, considering 2005 is being lauded as the new 1999, it's fitting that they're back at it again; some former Kozmo employees have started a new one-hour delivery service focusing this time on the needs of time-strapped new parents. Sounds like the new MaxDelivery has taken some lessons to heart from its experience with Kozmo. Once again, they've started in New York, which is a good thing considering the population density of delivery-addicted New Yorkers. And this time around, they're charging $4.95 for delivery for orders under $50. I hope they also have cool messenger bags -- I'd love to pick one of them up on eBay in about a year.

Visual Thesaurus looks interesting:

I can't believe the hoops I'm having to jump through to order a $7.99 piece of software. Obviously the folks at SipPhone have no clue about ecommerce or web usability. I suggest they start with Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think and go from there.

He is what I've gone through so far. Fumble around their website trying to figure out how to order their Xten X-Pro 2.0 softphone software. Something like "Purchase Now" or "Buy" would be much better than "Available on MySipphone Store". Ok, so I click over there. It takes me to some bogus page advertising stuff I'm not interested in. Nowhere does it explain whats going on. I have to assume that I need to register in order to goto this MySipphone Store. So I attempt to register. It then asks me for all this info from a purchase I've made from them. Um, no, I'm trying to purchase something, not fill in my product info etc. Ah, there is a link at the bottom of the page for us folks that haven't purchased something from them. I almost missed it.

Now they present me with one of these absolutely asinine security images. Look at this crap:

Can someone tell me what that 1st or 5th number is? It isn't a 5, 6 or anything else because nothing I tried worked. What kind of ridiculous crap is this anyway? It took me 6 tries to get past this and I only did because it finally came up with an image without this mystery number in it.

Ok, so I finally get past that and have to wait for an email as a confirmation. At least I received that in under a minute and I clicked on the link to verify the registration. Unfortunately it then said I had to wait for yet another email with my password. Why they can't just display it on the webpage I'll never figure out. That email took about 10 mins to get to me while I stared at the login page like a moron.

Ah, finally I get to login to my.sipphone.com to order my software. I'm presented with all kinds of crap I'm entirely not interested in and have to search for the shop link. Remember, about 20 minutes ago I clicked on a link to buy a specific piece of software. My guess is I'll have to find it again.

Well, at least it was easy to find. Now, I click on the link to purchase and guess what. I get some lousy message saying I haven't tested my account yet. I couldn't care about my SipPhone account. I don't want an account. I just want to purchase this software. What a joke.

I decide I've had enough of this and call their phone number. I'm presented with a couple menu choices and then dropped into a voice mail box before I'm able to make a choice. I hang up after pressing numbers for a while. I suspect some moron will get a voice message with a bunch of tones. I couldn't be bothered to leave a message.

Its pretty simple at this point. I give up trying to purchase this. Problem is I haven't found any other SIP softphone that works. Anyone have any recommendations? It has to support G.729 at the very least and work with any SIP provider I'd like to plug into it.

Update: You'll want to see this entry for the followup to this.

I thought I would put together an example using Ajaxian techniques, JSRS and Google Maps. Click here to go see the example. Quoted from that page:

This is just a prototype example using Ajaxian techniques, JSRS (Javascript Remote Scripting), and Google Maps to show how one could display network monitoring updates in real-time. I started putting this together about a month ago when there were just two known implementations using Google Maps out on the net. One was Chicago Crime Maps and the other was Housing Maps. It really only took me a couple days to put together as I only had a few hours here and there over the time period to actually work on it. I'm usually too busy getting paid to do this kind of stuff so I don't normally spend time like this just for fun anymore. Since starting Google has changed the Map implementation a couple times so I had to fix things and now they've actually come out with a Google Maps API to make things a million times easier so people don't have to hack this stuff together. They were a couple weeks too late so I'm still using old techniques here that will likely stop working at some point.

Erik is right on the money here:

VoIP Magazine writer Bryan Richard has a lot to say about Skype. I happen to think Skype is a good thing for VoIP in general as it increases awareness and brings more attention to the softphone. I also firmly beleive that Skype will either adopt SIP [by partnership or other] or be a smaller VoIP player in the near future. Proprietary protocols will never make it long term when there are good open standard alternatives out there.

To say that Skype is a SIP killer is pure garbage.

I thought I would mess around with the new Google Earth and try overlaying Radar images. Obviously with a bit of work this can be really useful. Click here for a full image of the following:

BTW, if I was running one of the current mapping software companies I'd be filling my pants and looking for a new job. With Google Earth you can now get an application for $20 that used to cost 1000 times that much. I haven't been in the GIS / mapping industry for a long time so I'm guessing at that number but it can't be that far off.

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this as I couldn't careless about 24 Hour Laundry and I have not been following all the hoopla about it other than from reading a few blog postings.

Once I found out Marc Andreesen is involved I was even more uninterested as I haven't really been impressed with anything Marc has done.

Anyway, I'll agree with Mark Fletcher on his views. As for Russell Beattie, I won't bother holding judgement until 24 Hour Laundry has launched as I think I'll completely ignore it when it someone I know personally tells me it is something I need to checkout.