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I’ve been meaning to sign up with the Skype-in service for a while now. Skype-in is a landline phone number that transfers to my Skype account when called. The cool thing about a Skype-in number is that you can get it in one of 18 countries around the world. This is useful for me as I can tell my family and friends in the UK to call me on a London phone number, and this will get connected to Skype on my computer.

The only problem with this is that if your computer isn’t turned on at the time then you wouldn’t receive the call. The solution to this has been to also purchase the voicemail service from Skype. But now Skype have also introduced call-forwarding, so that if you don’t answer your Skype call, or your computer is turned off, you can nominate another phone number that the call should transfer to. As with most call-forwarding services, you pay the costs to the forwarded number, but as the Skype rates are so low anyway, this is minimal.

Skype Pro…

The encouragement for finally signing up to the Skype-in service came from the fact that Skype have now released a new service called Skype Pro. This service gives you free national calls to landlines from Skype, free voicemail service, call transfers, and a €30 discount on the Skype-in number. This brings down the cost of Skype-in from €50 (NZD$87) to €20 (NZD$35) for 12 months. So it’s a great deal and it opens up the Skype service to give you all sorts of options for managing your calls.

Confused?

If that all sounds confusing, here’s how it all adds up:

• My Mum can call me on my own London number.
• If I’m logged in to Skype, I can choose to answer the call on the computer or transfer it to the home phone.
• If the computer is turned off, the call automatically transfers to my home number.
• And if we don’t answer the home phone, the call diverts to our answer machine.

How much does it cost?

• The Skype Pro account is $3 per month and this gives you free national calls, and free voicemail.
• The Skype-in phone number is €20 for 12 months after the Skype Pro discount.
• Transferring a Skype call to my home phone is 3c per minute.

Problems!

One of the problems that I’m worried about is if our London number starts getting called by telemarketers in the middle of our night. The alternative then would be to not use the call forwarding feature, but to just send the call straight to voice mail. I would still be able to transfer the calls to our home number from Skype if I was logged in, but if Skype wasn’t running then I wouldn’t know about the missed call until I logged back into Skype.

Ideally, I would want to only transfer to the home number during certain times, but that functionality doesn’t exist in Skype yet. I think I’ll see how it works out for now – it all gets a bit confusing!

Side note:

Miramar Mike is also trialing the new Skype Pro package. He’s opted for a local (Wellington) Skype-in number and is even considering ditching his Telstra home number and going pure-Skype! Follow his experiment here.

I saw this on MiramarMike’s blog and the on Jim Donovan’s En Avant blog. Take the test at Mingle2 to see how geeky you are!

69% Geek

I’ve updated the search code for this blog so that results no longer jump into the Google site. Results now appear on the following page: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/search and I moved the search box to the top of the sidebar.

Here’s an example search.

Cartoonist, Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid nicely sums up the history of most blogs (including mine) in the following cartoon:

Now that the whole ‘Web 2.0’ fad is dying down a bit now, I find sites like TechCrunch much less interesting. I’m bored of hearing about all the new startups/mashups/acquisitions/Google-killers/YouTube-killers/<insert well known site name here>-killers.

A cool story about how blogging and Google brought a present to our daughter, Elliot…

Over the last few days, we have received lots of presents from friends and family for the arrival of Elliot, who sends her thanks by the way. But one present from Karen and Jason had the wrong address on it, didn’t have a return address, and was sent just to Elliot Maxwell.

So what would you do if you received a package addressed to someone else with no return address? Well, our neighbour down the road (who doesn’t know us) opened the card and present to find more clues about who the gift belonged to. The card inside didn’t mention any other names apart from Elliot Maxwell, but it was obvious that the present for a newborn baby.

Google to the rescue, and despite the fact that Elliot was not even 10 days old at the time, the first record for a search for Elliot Maxwell was indeed our daughter as featured on our DebandStu blog! And as we keep our contact email addresses on the site, we received an email that day to find out that the parcel was delivered to the house just down the road from us.

So thanks, Russell, for your ingenuity!

 I’m actually rather impressed that TVNZ have started using YouTube to distribute some of their TVNZ ondemand videos. They have a customised URL to provide their start page: http://www.youtube.com/tvnz

Artur Bergman, over at O’Reilly Radar, has started an interesting discussion about Amazon’s S3 service and how start-ups/companies are relying on the service without having any guarantees to its availability or uptime.

So, if your company is based on AWS: What does your disaster recovery plan look like? How do you react if Amazon goes down or if Amazon decides to shut down AWS? What happens next December when a busy holiday season makes Amazon divert bandwidth from S3 to their main business, Amazon.com?

From Amazon’s site, their definition of Simple Storage Service:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

I’ve been brewing an idea in my head for a new business that, if it went ahead, would heavily utilise Amazon’s S3 service as it would require lots of highly available storage without the huge startup costs usually associated with implementing redundant, distributed storage arrays and networks.

But the idea of relying solely on Amazon’s service for critical data does scare me, as they provide no SLAs, contracts, or other guarantees that the service will be available for any set length of time. On the other hand, if the business is successful then there should be funds available to implement a secondary, backup copy once the money starts rolling in.

I like Artur’s suggestions to Amazon about implementing optional SLAs that customers can pay a premium for:

• Change the T&C to at least promise to give paying customers a notice of a certain amount of days if they choose to shut the service down.
• Publish their current uptime and availability to their customers.
• Show you how many copies of a file exists, and how quickly a file uploaded to them becomes redundant.

O’Reilly Radar > Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA

 I was wondering why the inline tags I was posting to WordPress with Windows Live Writer weren’t being translated into proper tags by the Simple Tagging plugin (as described here.) Turns out I was running an ancient version of Simple Tagging which didn’t have that feature. Simple Tagging is now on version 1.67 and introduces heaps of new features and better customisation.

My Tag Cloud looks a bit better now, but perhaps I need to be more liberal with my use of tags.

Simple Tagging is another tagging plugin for WordPress: smarter, better, faster

Simple Tagging for WordPress – Trac

Microsoft’s new integrated infrastructure management product, System Center Essentials 2007, has recently been released in NZ. It’s a management solution for small and medium sized businesses that provides similar functionality to Microsoft’s enterprise products like SMS and MOM, with additional features relevant to the smaller businesses.

This should turn out to be popular in NZ as it targets a huge portion of companies that have up to 30 servers and less than 500 computers. Out of the box it includes licenses to manage 10 servers and 50 computers with additional license packs available to be purchased up to the 30/500 limit.

Here are some links which provide a good starting point to learn about the product:

• Microsoft System Center -> System Center Essentials
• System Center Essentials Wiki
• The Sean Blog : System Center Essentials 30/500

I love reading Seth’s blog so I was surprised to see his post about Britain’s Got Talent winner, Paul Potts. I don’t think Seth understood the format of the show and I don’t even think he watched the whole video.

First, that Cord, the blogger who posted the video, felt like the singer had no confidence. I completely disagree. Bad teeth doesn’t mean no confidence. His posture on stage makes it clear that he has completely mastered his craft.

Firstly, Paul admits himself that he has no confidence in himself, which is probably why he was still just a mobile phone salesman. Secondly, nobody in the video comments that Paul’s got bad teeth so I’m not sure why Seth mentions this.

But the real takeaway for me is how small-minded, snarky and downright mean the three judges are. Even (or especially) when they are surprised by his performance, they act as if they somehow deserve to sit in judgment of him.

This is where Seth obviously doesn’t understand the format of the show. It’s like a Pop Idol show, but for all “talents” and not just singing. So you can imagine the absolute crap that they are bombarded with all day – especially from those that are just keen to get on TV. Also, singing opera is a skill that few have, so seeing an unassuming, mobile phone salesman, nervously walk on to stage and claim to be able to sing opera definitely deserves some skepticism.

I do, however, think that Amanda was a bit too condescending when she made the two comments indicating that Paul was either a lump of coal (about to turn into a diamond) or a frog (that would turn into a prince.)

But it’s such a great video, I’ll embed it again!