Bus error: Jake Billo's weblog

Part of a comment I posted at BlackBerry Cool, which is complete speculation and relies on general industry-wide knowledge:

With respect to WiFi, RIM’s strategy seems to be that they offer it to carriers committed to UMA. This is likely because carriers still derive revenue from UMA clients, which makes up for the offset data costs over WiFi. At present I can’t think of a CDMA carrier with UMA planned – Sprint seems to be intent on selling base stations with native 800/1900 coverage – so I wouldn’t expect to see a WiFi device on a CDMA network any time this year.

January 16/09: This post has been modified to avoid giving the impression that I speak in any official capacity. I’m merely a mobile phone enthusiast and these are my personal observations about the wireless industry.

Normally I’m not into YouTube video whoring, but the United States of Pop video (which remixes the Billboard top hits of 2007) is alternately impressive, but really demonstrates that all the top songs of 2007 sounded the same, and that “Umbrella” is a track that can accompany any lyrics.

So allegedly Jake is foolish enough to have given me an “Editor” account on here – which not only lets me post stuff – but also lets me edit his posts. Now I’m a generally responsible person, but seriously – I made the Martina-Shot, okay?

Also, the new WordPress admin panel is much nicer than it use to be, and comes with a nice Web 2.0 colour scheme; mixing pale and vibrant blues with a sandy yellow, as well as a blue tinged black that would look much better were it brown.

However I digress, I have something more important to say than the obligatory “first post“. This, my captive audience, is a story of extended partitions.

A while back I decided that I wanted to give Vista a try, and the only machine I had that was capable of running all the whorish features I wanted to try was my laptop – and there was no way at that time I was making my laptop’s primary OS Vista. So my friend Murdoch who runs Linux suggested I download partition magic and make a partition to install Vista to. This sounded like a great idea, so I tried it, it worked – and for a while I was happy with my dual boot.

That is until I realized I wasn’t using Vista that often, and my hard drive size was becoming increasingly small. So I decided to embark on the quest of removing this extended partition.

Allegedly this is not something easily done. Partition magic failed at it, which didn’t really make me all that happy – and after some quick google searches and conferencing with Jake I came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to wipe my entire disk and reinstall an OS.

Three months later [read: last night], I was finally ready to do a reformat. In went the Vista disk [which I’ve adopted on the laptop now], and up came the “Install Vista where?” screen. I saw my quarry – sitting proudly ontop of my 15 gigs of space that I’d like back – but it had outsmarted me because the Vista install disk had no idea what the fuck and could not delete, reformat, or do anything to the partition.

Great. So I installed Vista overtop of the old XP install and decided to try the Vista Disk Management tool that a few of my friends have been talking about. The extended partition showed up as “Free Space” which unfortunately is neither “Unallocated Space” or an “Extended Partition”. After a few attempts at deleting the partition – each time met with the oddly inapplicable error message: “There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this action”.

After some posts on the good old interweb, I’ve been suggested a few apps to try and help recover my 15 gigs. I’ll post back if I end up reclaiming them.

The moral of the story though? Don’t use extended partitions unless you never want the space back!

For Business 121, one of the major projects for the term is to develop a marketing strategy for a company offering a new product or service. Our group developed a concept for an offshoot of Curves, which offers fitness facilities and quick workouts for females.

“The Man’s Gym” is a male-oriented gym that avoids the traditional approaches of isocentrism and healthy lifestyle maintenance. Rather than focusing on pumping iron and bodybuilding, or cardiovascular training, The Man’s Gym employs unique activities such as:

The presentation is intended to be tongue-in-cheek: we rotated pie charts to display statistics with more favourable outcomes and slides are (generally) only on screen for about five seconds each. I tried for a Steve Jobs keynote feel with this design, and it seemed to work out pretty well.

Hit the picture below to grab a PDF copy of the slide deck. While the accompanying business plan document is significantly more dry (and thus not worth publishing), the presentation was worth a 96% and that’s really what counted in this effort.

The accompanying audio ad for the “Radio Ad Sample” slide that I whipped up in five minutes with GarageBand can also be acquired here, and should be playable in iTunes or any other utility that plays AAC audio files.

It’s notable how the tone of this site has changed recently. Most of my posts lately are about the wireless industry in Canada, or other hot button topics that I can rant about without giving a personal view of the situation – apart from being a CS student with clearly too many cell phones, today’s posts aren’t all about me.

Offtopic: Perhaps this is a good thing: I was accosted several weeks ago by someone I attended high school with and told “I shouldn’t write about people that I don’t know anything about.” The world does not work this way, and “know[ing] anything” was misused in place of “don’t say anything if you don’t have anything nice to say tell me what I want to hear.” Likewise, hilarity would not ensue if I were prevented from writing about Soulja Boy.

(I did indeed attend a semester of classes with this individual, which is a decent basis for knowing at least SOMETHING about someone. For what it’s worth, I don’t even remember the post, and a quick perusal of my former site didn’t turn up the allegedly inflammatory remarks.)

Apart from this, though, I’m almost done my first semester back at UW out of two. Of my courses, CS246 has been the most interesting and informative; I’d say my command line C++ skills are now significantly improved.

The big news, though, is that on May 1st I’ll be moving out from home again. I’ll still be in Waterloo, but living with some friends for a year. It’s something I’ve really been looking forward to; there might even be a good business idea when we’re all in reasonably close proximity. Significant downsizing of personal effects will be necessary, and all I’ve essentially done is trade a basement room 20 minutes away from school for a basement room 5 minutes away.

Still, exciting news and interesting times ahead.

Rogers users last week were delivered letters indicating the provider’s intent to start implementing usage caps of 60GB and 95GB for the two standard tiers, Express and Extreme. Their misinformation site contains some interesting usage calculations, but essentially muddies the waters by describing activities in an “or” context: for example, you could download 24 high-definition videos (at about 4GB each) OR download 24,300 songs.

I’m admittedly surprised at their references to BitTorrent and high-definition movie downloads, but frankly that’s what their target audience is with this particular site: heavy users that they hope to coerce into keeping under a specific 95GB point.

The problem for consumers with this approach is that it’s no longer just the top 10% of users being targetted – a 95GB cap means that the top 10% of users will be using close to that amount, and it would be trivial for the ISP to reduce the figure in the future, even as more bandwidth intensive applications emerge.

Good news, though: extra bandwidth usage charges top out at $25 extra per month, which is a fee I’ll likely be paying part of every month upon my next move. (I also have full intent to purchase a TekSavvy unlimited account as well.)

From a network management perspective, I understand the need to keep subscribers and abusers of the service under control. There have always been provisions in every Internet contract for disconnecting people based on overuse, even back when dialup connections were standard. I’m irked that something previously touted as “unlimited” has gotten to the point where a hard cap and extra charges are necessary. Having heavy users on your network comes with the territory of having users like Granny checking her email once a week.

Admittedly, my Internet usage patterns tend to encompass newsgroup downloading and hefty SCP/SFTP transfers – on a regular basis working for IBM, I’d have to prop the latest Eclipse builds from Ottawa down the home line. Combined with the rest of the mandatory software suite, the nightly package could be 5GB.

One thing that will be interesting to see is Rogers’ deep packet inspection and rewriting – the usage message that caused issue back in December. They have an example image shown on one of their magazine property websites.

As soon as they start to insert HTML arbitrarily into webpages, that’s where they’ve crossed the line.

Are you going to change your internet usage patterns as a result of these developments? How much bandwidth are you using on a monthly basis?

Facebook’s finally heard the hue and cry from all of those kids whose parents insist on “friending” them. You’re now able to restrict access to profile features and content based on specific users and groups of people, which I’ve promptly employed to sequester elementary and high school acquaintances away from viewing specific adventures.

I’d suggest you go ahead and update your settings, mostly because I could swear mine were more restrictive before the update was pushed.

As the two most commented posts on my site show, people are really interested in getting their high-definition MKV files to play on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the existing GOTsent utility isn’t working out as a complete solution, and complicates the situation by trying to cater to PlayStation 3 users. 😉

I’ve developed a tool in VB2005 that automates the conversion process. It doesn’t transcode the video – just the audio so that the file will properly play. While the tool isn’t complete at present, and probably won’t work for files above 4GB, it’s served my immediate needs. I’d encourage anyone interested to check out the XenonMKV site and download a copy if interested. There’s also a support forum for people that run into issues with files.

From Boy Genius Report:

Deutsche Telekom has been pre-approved for a financing and protocol agreement which will allow them to introduce T-Mobile to the Canadian market (subject to restrictions in all provinces except Ontario during a 6, 12 and 18 month trial period that expires in 2010), and also pre-approves them for testing roaming, cell tower reception and international data agreements.

More details from the source, but the information seems credible – and after all, isn’t another wireless player in Canada what we’d like?

The most common complaint I hear about T-Mobile in the States is their lack of coverage compared to AT&T or Verizon, but realistically, another GSM carrier would really only give people options. The ability to roam on Rogers towers for brief periods of time – especially if government mandated cooperation occurred – could also improve the coverage situation drastically.

I’ve been getting random IM’s from infrequent contacts on Windows Live Messenger (MSN). These all have a weird domains or “viewprofile.php”-style links, which is usually a good indicator that your system is presently compromised with a trojan or worm. Run a virus scan if you’ve been getting complaints. Stinger will probably even take care of things.

Since I run a MacBook using That Damned Quacking Duck for instant messaging, my own smug sense of superiority is enough to prevent infection.