Gimmick alert!

My experience with the AT&T shared data plan (AT&T Mobile Share) for a family of 5 smartphones.

Unshared Option

3GB line/mo $30/line/mo = $150 15GB per month for 5 lines. $5/mo unlimited text = $30 per months for 5 lines. $60 700 rollover voice mins family plan (700 is the lowest you can go on voice). On average, we use less than 200 voice minutes per month). Total Cost $240.

Shared Option

$70 per mo "base cost" plus $40/line/mo = $200 for 4GB shared data per month plus unlimited text and voice. Total cost $270.

If like us, you are a heavy data user, the Shared Option would cost $30 more per month and would get you 11GB LESS than the Unshared plan. Unlimited Voice is a "don't care" for us.

Conclusions

First, AT&T Mobile Share is a gimmick. Even though its billed as shared "data", what you're really getting is unlimited Voice (the sales rep conceded).

Second, being charged a minimum $60/mo for 700 mins of voice that we dont use and need is bogus. We, the consumers, are subsidizing AT&T. There should be a no-voice option with 911 only service.

Third, and most significantly, carriers are still stuck on selling voice service and they are hocking it as if it matters.

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We Have Pi!

It a took some time to gather a few missing parts but last night, finally, Daron and I booted-up our Raspberry Pi Version-B (RPi). It was exhilarating!

I don't remember exactly what got me hooked on the idea, but after months of reading about the RPi in blogs, I placed an order in early July, 2012. The open source nature and the stated missions of RPi to get high schools hands-on and below the hood with boards and OS's topped me over.

Daron, my youngest and high school freshman (RPi target audience) has shown just enough interest along the way to keep me motivated! When the package arrived in early August, I posted a pic of the bare board on Facebook and got a fair number of thumbs-up. I knew this was going to be fun.

Out of Pocket

• We were on the waiting list for several weeks with Newark/Element14. Board plus red plastic enclosure including shipping and handing $53.39
• An HDMI to DVI cable which we got on eBay for $3.43 including shipping.
• We had 2GB microSD card but wanted a larger capacity one so we got an 8GB card on eBay with adapter and free shipping direct from China for $4.94
• Some months back, I recycled a couple of superlong CAT5 cables. Our RPi workbench is quite a distance from the Ethernet router. So we needed a Cable Joiner which we got on eBay a set of 2 (no less) for $0.99 with free shipping direct from China!

Total: $62.75

Initial boot

Plus Ethernet

Reuse

We reused the following items from around the house:

• Apple iPad adapter
• Motorola micro USB charger cable
• BTC 6100C USB keyboard
• Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB Mouse
• RJ45 CAT 5 5E Ethernet
• Pair of headphones

The Software

We stated with Raspbian “wheezy” download 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.zip

Daron used these steps and his Windows laptop to create the SD card for the RPi. Worked the first time. The instructions included the following ominous note "Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy your computer's hard disk!"

Issues and Workarounds

• Pocket Mouse 72114 USB Mouse did not work with the RPi. This one isn't on this list of Problem USB Mouse Devices. Tried registering on the site to add this device to the list but wasn't able to. Thwarted!
• Had to change locale and keyboard mapping using these steps. I found this out when I tried logging into Gmail with my account where the password includes a symbol font. Shift-2 and Shift-3 were mapped to a British variant.
• Had to change timezone to Pacific using these steps.
• As soon as I was browsing, I got excited and jumped into Gmail. Slooow and even crashed once.  I love the CPU indicator on the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). Its like the RPM indicator on a car. Lets you know when things are maxing the RPi out. At 700MHz and 256MB RAM, maxing out is easy to go but still plenty of potential.

ToDo List

• Buy a Adafruit power supply for more juice. 
• Buy a USB hub.
• Connect a wireless keyboard and mouse.
• Buy a USB Wi-Fi adapter and connect to NahaNet.
• Connect to external audio.

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OS X Mountain Lion musings

I have a trusty MacBook Pro early-2008 model which I upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion recently.

The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly - surprising compared to Windows experiences of years gone by. The laptop had the original 2MB of RAM which it came with. Things slowed down in a scary way (to the point where I was wondering if the upgrade was a good idea).

I upgraded memory to 4MB off eBay and things are back to normal. I could have upgraded to 8MB but that was a bit over budget for me.

MySQL O_o

I'm a novice hobbyist software tinkerer. As I started down the path of migrating a Java app to Amazon Web Services, I discovered that MySQL that I have running for years pre-Mountain Lion had stopped working. MySQL would fail to start with the error message "The MySQL Database Server installation was not found. Please make sure the /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin file is present."

Oops

After some searching around, this page from dougr provided the hint, though the original article was for Leopard. It was simple case of a symbolic link to that went missing during the upgrade.

At first, I placed the link under /Users/roupen which turns out was wrong (I did say I am a novice). I placed the link under /usr/local like so sudo ln -s mysql-5.0.51a-osx10.5-x86 mysql

Ahhh yes, finally running

Things are happy again now!

Growl No More

The other thing that I did is remove Growl after some looking around. I'm all in with the Mountain Lion Notifications. When I looked at apps that Growl preferences pannel, there were only a handful of apps listed there are using Growl. Several were old-old apps that I no longer use (and had since uninstalled). I used the Growl Uninstaller listed on this page and bam! done.

Google Music Manager No More

Having taken a break from Android (was always an iPhone user), I also removed Google Music Manager. I didn't realize removing the app from the Applications folder wasn't sufficient. Some additional clean-up was required as listed here. Thank you Google for complete uninstall instructions. Remains to be seen if I will get back to Android and Google Music some day... Android JellyBean was the last flavor of Android for me for now...

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All Strabucks aren't created equal

Some Starbucks stores don't have ovens - not sure why. Doesn't seem to be a "size" thing since the one I'm at this morning is as big as others I've been at. Maybe its a ventilation thing. Note sure.

 
But I know that a multi-grain bagel isn't the same when not toasted; at room temperature, its like eating tasty cardboard.

PS: What's the plural of Strabucks?

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More than a weekend project

I composed this post back in July, 2008, but never clicked Publish.

Since mid-Feb, my good friend Tom and I have been working on a web project: ScoobyDeal.com, is a deal-at-a-time social commerce site for cool gadgets and great deals. We're down to the last week of testing and bugfixing. I think of this project as my Guy Kawasaki how-I-built-a-web-site for under $X.

This is a v1 of ScoobyDeal with plans to add other social features. This post lays it all out for posterity.

We started the project Mid-Feb and have been working with an awesome team distributed globally on the implementation while doing the product/project management and testing State-side. So here is the breakdown.

One-time Costs:

• Corporate entity: $115, DIY at the Secretary of State's office in San Francisco.
• UI Design (mockups and flows): in- house with endless hours with Adobe Illustrator and lots of help from good friends.
• UI Development: $935 Web Cake, Cairo, Egypt. Initial concepts State-side $350.
• Web Development: $24,500 Idea2It, Chennai, India.
• Logo: $125 Ukraine.
• Copy: in-house (the typos are my fault).

Infrastructure:

• PayPal Web Payments Pro for credit card processing.
• Google Maps API.
• Google Custom Search Engine.
• Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Aparche and Mongrel plus MySQL
• ImageMagick.

Ongoing Costs:

• Web Hosting: Virtual Private Server $49.99/mo. Server Point.
• Collaboration: $12/mo. Basecamp Personal Edition.
• Credit Card Processing: $30/mo. PayPal.
• Version Control and Bug Tracking: $49/year ProjectLocker Light Angel Edition.

Special Thanks:

• Kamo Asateryan for help with social marketing.
• Brodey Jenkins for creativitiy.
• Suren Markossian for help with instrastrucutre.
• Sanjay Kapoor for help with Ruby and Rails.
• Alex Chee for the initial design.
• Team Viewer for being such an awesome product.

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Octofeed.com and me

I tried out ocotofeed.com the other week. Octofeed is a cleaner way to read your Facebook Wall and Newsfeed. I liked it and turned my wife to it. She quickly noticed some posts from her feed weren't appearing in Octofeed. I emailed hello@octofeed.com and Daniel Chin-Yee responded promptly.

 It turns out that octofeed, like other apps, is at the mercy of the Facebook API's which don't pump all the content out. Plus, what gets pumped out to other apps varies by your friend's privacy settings. So the layout is great but you may not see everything. We've both cooled off Octofeed since. And here is the rest of it.

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Gems Gems everywhere!

Today, I set out to upgrade my MacBook Pro to a full fledged dev machine. For this, I added XCode Tools and about a dozen 10 Ruby gems plus ImageMagick which proved to be a bit hairy.

Here we go...

Last login: Fri Jun 27 22:14:41 on console
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem install RubyInline
Updating metadata for 528 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org/
...............................................................................complete
Successfully installed rubyforge-1.0.0
Successfully installed hoe-1.6.0
Successfully installed RubyInline-3.7.0
3 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for rubyforge-1.0.0...
Installing ri documentation for hoe-1.6.0...
Installing ri documentation for RubyInline-3.7.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rubyforge-1.0.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for hoe-1.6.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for RubyInline-3.7.0...

Cool, 3 birds with 1 stone.

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem install log4r
Successfully installed log4r-1.0.5
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for log4r-1.0.5...
Installing RDoc documentation for log4r-1.0.5...
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem install dsl_accessor

Successfully installed activesupport-2.1.0
Successfully installed dsl_accessor-0.1.0
2 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for activesupport-2.1.0...
Installing ri documentation for dsl_accessor-0.1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for activesupport-2.1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for dsl_accessor-0.1.0...

Cool, 2 birds with 1 stone.

Next, i installed google-geocode but it turns out I didn’t need it so I uninstalled it (Murali ;-) ).

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem install google-geocode
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions into the /usr/bin directory.
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem install google-geocode
Password:
Successfully installed ZenTest-3.10.0
Successfully installed rc-rest-2.2.1
Successfully installed google-geocode-1.2.1
3 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for ZenTest-3.10.0...
Installing ri documentation for rc-rest-2.2.1...
Installing ri documentation for google-geocode-1.2.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for ZenTest-3.10.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rc-rest-2.2.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for google-geocode-1.2.1...
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall google-geocode
Successfully uninstalled google-geocode-1.2.1
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall zentest
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)
    Unknown gem zentest->= 0
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall ZenTest

You have requested to uninstall the gem:
ZenTest-3.10.0
rc-rest-2.2.1 depends on [ZenTest (>= 3.4.2)]
If you remove this gems, one or more dependencies will not be met.
Continue with Uninstall? [Yn]  n
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::DependencyRemovalException)
    Uninstallation aborted due to dependent gem(s)
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall rc-rest
Successfully uninstalled rc-rest-2.2.1
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall ZenTest
Successfully uninstalled ZenTest-3.10.0
Remove executables:
autotest, multiruby, multiruby_setup, rails_test_audit, unit_diff, zentest

in addition to the gem? [Yn]  Y
Removing autotest
Removing multiruby
Removing multiruby_setup
Removing rails_test_audit
Removing unit_diff
Removing zentest

A quick visual check…

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.0.2, 1.3.6)
actionpack (2.0.2, 1.13.6)
actionwebservice (1.2.6)
activerecord (2.0.2, 1.15.6)
activeresource (2.0.2)
activesupport (2.1.0, 2.0.2, 1.4.4)
acts_as_ferret (0.4.1)
capistrano (2.0.0)
cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.2)
daemons (1.0.7)
dnssd (0.6.0)
dsl_accessor (0.1.0)
fastthread (1.0)
fcgi (0.8.7)
ferret (0.11.4)
gem_plugin (0.2.2)
highline (1.2.9)
hoe (1.6.0)
hpricot (0.6)
libxml-ruby (0.3.8.4)
log4r (1.0.5)
mongrel (1.0.1)
needle (1.3.0)
net-sftp (1.1.0)
net-ssh (1.1.2)
rails (2.0.2, 1.2.6)
rake (0.8.1, 0.7.3)
RedCloth (3.0.4)
ruby-openid (1.1.4)
ruby-yadis (0.3.4)
rubyforge (1.0.0)
rubygems-update (1.1.1)
RubyInline (3.7.0)
rubynode (0.1.3)
sqlite3-ruby (1.2.1)
termios (0.9.4)

Carry on…

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem install image_science
Password:
Successfully installed image_science-1.1.3
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for image_science-1.1.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for image_science-1.1.3...
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ 

Time for ImageMagick.

See this go to section about Mac OS X binary release.

Download ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.3.0.tar.gz and copy to /Users/roupen or somewhere permanent because you’re going to point environment variables to here.

tar xvfz ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.3.0.tar.gz
rm ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.3.0.tar.gz

You should see a new dir /Users/roupen/ImageMagick-6.4.1

Next, set some env variables

export MAGICK_HOME="$HOME/ImageMagick-6.4.1"
export PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/bin:$PATH"
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/lib"

Run a quick test to make sure ImageMagick is working

Macintosh-2:~ roupen$ cd
Macintosh-2:~ roupen$ pwd
/Users/roupen
Macintosh-2:~ roupen$ convert
Version: ImageMagick 6.4.1 06/12/08 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

UPDATE

I had some problems getting RMagick going – the issue is well covered in discussions on the web. So I backed away from installing image_magic and then the rmagick gem separately. I deleted the image_magic directory and well rmagick never installed.

The NEW path that paid off is described here using rmagick-osx-installer. Search for How do I install RMagick on OS X? on this page for details.

As described in the README for the rmgaick_osx_installer, I first installed XCode Tools and X11SDK off the MacBook Pro DVD. After that, I installed the script and it took a while but it was very uneventful.

libpng was installed successfully
libjpeg was installed successfully
ghostscript was installed successfully
ghostscript-fonts-std was installed successfully
FreeType was installed successfully
libwmf was installed successfully
ImageMagick was installed successfully
RMagick was installed successfully
Removing rm_install_tmp directory...Done

I think I am done. The convert test passed.

Macintosh-2:rm_install-1.1.1 roupen$ convert
Version: ImageMagick 6.4.2 06/28/08 Q8 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

I got real close to using MacPorts for this last step but didn’t (felt heavy handed).

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Payo who?

Every now and then, a horrible customer service experience comes around that redefines for me what bad customer service actually is. Over the last 24 hours, I have been experiencing just that with Payoneer.com. I set out to transfer some funds (sub $1k) from here to an offshore location using their service. On this end, I am using a credit card.

The only way to reach these people is via chat support on their site where you wait time can vary from a few minutes to half an hour. The help you get over chat is robotic at best. You try calling their main number and "press-2" gets you to support which after telling you to go online actually dead-ends and the call drop right after they tell you to leave a message. You "press-3" to reach sales. Well, yesterday, I left a voice message and no one called back of course. Today, it too was dropping the call. There is no one to talk to.

Finally, it came down to them asking me to FAX over a copy of my drivers license and a copy of the back and front of the credit card I am using (as to why they wanted this is a whole other story of course). This came after I got an email yesterday telling me that the transaction was approved. Today, they decided they needed more "documentation".

Ok, so where do I send it to? They gave me 2 fax numbers non of which worked. Finally, they had the audacity to ask me to scan the 3 pages and send it in. Meanwhile, I had an unpleasnt call with one support rep. And an unpleasant chat with another. WOW! A horrible customer service experience.

I had to use these guys but if you ever have a choice, avoid this one.

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S3 the way to go for backups...

So I'm still a newb with all this web app dev stuff. One of the many worries as we get ready to deploy a real app - with real customer data - is backups.After hashing it over with Suren and Murali and talking with the hosting provider (ServerPoint - who so far haven't been very helpful, so may be x-provider soon).

My spiritual adviser at SpeedyRails, Maykel Rodriguez suggested S3 and he has the data to prove it.

For example, if you transfer 100MB every day to amazon s3, that's 3GB of data transfer-in per month, and then 3GB of storage (considering you only keep one month of backups), let's say you download 1GB per month as well and you have a total of 1000 requests (many http get/post requests)... this is... only 0.93 USD per month! LOL ... pretty cheap eh?

Here, do the math using the S3 cost calculator.

$0.93 BRILLIANT! EUREKA!

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Wazup up with eFax lately?

eFax is one of the very-very first "free" services that I remember coming across in my early days with the internet. So we are talking 10+ years.

It was always a paid and a free model. I signed-up for a free version and got a number. Who uses FAX these days anyway, you ask? I don't receive much but having school-aged kids, they receive homework and stuff from friends now and then...

So I guess this pre-Web 1.0 fixture must be having monitization issues because I have been getting some random emails from them in the last couple of months trying to get me to upgrade. First, it was "hey, your number is changing" GREAT! Its still customary to have a FAX number of business cards and I have used my eFAX number for years. Thanks eFAX! Today, it was an email saying I have received 45 pages in the last 90 days and that I am violating my service agreement.

First, I understand a company has to monitize but is this the best way to go around it with a 10+ year user? Second, in this day and age of VOIP and ad models, isn't there some other ways that eFAX can monitize?

I think I am going to look for an alternative service or just stop including a FAX number in my coordinates. As for the kids, we have an traditional FAX number attached to the phone line, they can start to use that...

UPDATE: I got (yet) another email from eFAX today that I violated their terms of use, yadi yada. This time, I called the sales number in the email (oy vey!). After some classical music, some perky lady answered and after asking for my eFax number she kept reminding me that they have NO infomration about my account (because its free). So then why am I getting these notices? She had no idea. Bottom line: wait until June 25, your old number will expire and we will issue a new one. Ha? That's it? thats it... According to her, they are trying to recover number because they are short (443 area codes? hm, ok). To me, this is just bully-spam to get people to upgrade. Shame on eFAX.

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