The Firehouse

Today, while looking at the last tirade by the anonymous German commentator on the Whisher blog, I went out searching for a plugin that would prevent someone from even posting comments based on their IP address (yes, WordPress has this in the preferences, but it will only mark posts as spam, it will not block access completely).

Stumbled upon Bannage, a very nifty but simple plugin that compares the IP address of the visitor to a set of ranges (you can use wildcards too to ban whole classes!) and changes the HTTP response to a 403 Forbidden, thus preventing him from even viewing the blog. If you get a lot of spam from you-know-which countries, this plugin is very well worth considering.

Over at the Whisher blog, we have some individual from Germany that is posting anonymous comments basically bashing us and saying some other WiFi startup is ever so much better. His last comment (we obviously will not approve senseless crap like this) now threatens to post screenshots of our censorship all over the internet, whatever that means. These are the comments we have received so far, feel free to judge for yourself if not approving them equals censorship, or that they are the work of a deluded troll just wanting to provoke.

my whishes | whishes@no.go

[someotherstartup].com succeded whisher did not. purely sad. they seem incompetent, very!!

gameover | gameover@test.it

whisher seems to be totally out. they cannot overcome the vista wifi problem – [someotherstartup].com could!

antiferran | antiferran@email.it

we dont like censorship. we told here that [someotherstartup].com has overcome these probs. whisher doesn´t !!

anti | anti@anti.it

we will blog your censorship everywhere in the net… use google, you will find!!

antimike | antikime@nomail.ol

no way for censorship! be aware, that screendumps of ALL your censorship can be find soon on the net, everywhere. NO WAY!

All these have been posted from IP addresses originating in Germany, so I think I have a pretty good idea of who is behind this, however, if I am right, he’s no longer promoting his usual startup, but another. In any case, please, give up.

As for the Vista issues in Whisher, it is true that we have had a very long and tedius integration process, but this is due to Vista having broken all previous behavior with something called Native WiFi, which is an extra layer in the onion (and a very thick one!), to make matters worse, hardly documented in the beginnings. The reason other WiFi tools work in Vista (the one this guy refers to doesn’t work that well at all as he claims) is that they don’t dig as deep as we do into the driver, basically using the garden-variety APIs for connecting and disconnecting from networks.

Just kidding – the content right now is not what I would call high grade material…but watching a friends 2.8GHz, 4GB of RAM laptop grind to a halt while watching some videos there, and playing with the rounded softy animated interface was an eye-opener. 50% of CPU and 80MB of RAM just to run this thing in the browser! Honestly, can’t we go back to sensitive, lightweight, well-designed and engineered websites? (OK, not just sites, “applications” too…). Ted was right when he wrote about Zoho. In a world where greentech is the new buzz, we are generating tons and tons of emissions just because an entrepreneur and a few engineers thought it would be cool to animate a tab change in their web-based UI, when a simple transition, or even a page reload, would be just as effective, and I’m pretty sure nobody would mind. Is it time to start thinking about green web development? Loic, any thoughts?

This is a riot! I remember these two from my years in the UK, and they are still just as funny as they were back then. Here is the first video, in which they explain in their particularly satiric manner the credit crunch:

And then, they go onto explaining how the subprime mess came to be:

Enjoy!

It was fun while it lasted. It seems that Ted Dziuba, the hand behind Uncov, the extremely harsh startup review site, has given up, curiously, at the same time he attended the Crunchies, and is launching his own Web two-dot-oh startup, Persai.

Always extremely critic of other startups in the new ’social internet’, he was often cited as the anti-Techcrunch, providing alternative not-so-shiny reviews of the same companies featured there. The professional blogosphere is very closed and competitive medium, and so, you can find yourself in a position where you get effectively blackballed from being mentioned in most top blogs, either for making fun of them (like Ted did) or by being strongly criticized in one. In the latter case, it will be the rest of bloggers who will not want to step on the first one’s toes, and write good reviews or posts, for fear that their friendship could suffer.

So, I guess Ted finally woke up and saw the reality, and realized that he has to play ball in order to get his own startup promoted around the blogs and forums. It would be interesting to know what kind of reception he got at the Crunchies, I bet it wasn’t warm, and this made him see what happens to those who stray from the politically correct path. In any case, good luck with Persai Ted, you made us laugh a few times.

I don’t particularly enjoy criticizing companies, but sometimes things are so obvious (which is not to say they are not clever) they deserve a post, even if it’s on a tiny little blog like this.

Today, got an email from Dash, the makers of the car GPS navigation unit on steroids, and for which I applied to receive one of their “beta” units. Didn’t really get one, which was not appreciated, particularly considering I have been involved with GPS technologies since the first portable units were manufactured, such as the Garmin GPS-55AVD (which I still keep). From developing complex fishing buoy data systems to tracking a fleet of over 200 garbage trucks (when GPRS was not even invented, and it was all done over analog radio modems), I even helped Kenwood debug their TK-780 (also known as Fleetsync) radios, the first sporting built-in GPS data relay modems. So, even though I felt well qualified to get a test unit, I never even got an email from Dash, until it was time to pre-order. Then, out of the blue, an email arrives:

Dear N/A:

We’ve had a great response to our recent pre-order email program and are working hard to finish the first version of the product for general consumer sales. Thank you for your continued interest and support! We hope you don’t mind taking just a few minutes to answer this brief survey. As always, your effort is much appreciated.

The survey itself can be found here. Before it disappears, I have taken a screenshot of the extremely short “survey”:

Yeah, it took no time at all. I believe one can click one of the checkboxes and hit ‘Submit’ in less than one second (they said “a few minutes” in their email…maybe the survey site is slow to load, who knows!).

Now, do I have any reason to think that this is cleverly concealed spam? I mean, they only ask me if I was aware they are taking pre-orders, and in case I forgot, they handily provide the link to the order page – in bold. Are they not interested in any other opinion I may have? Or things I’d like to see in their product? Or suggestions and comments? Rating their efforts? No, they just wanted to remind me that I can pre-order one of their devices. Alas, I think I will pass on this one.

Update: I just received an email from Christian Gunning of Boingo clarifying the situation, and stating that if you indeed are on a Mobile or Global plan, you will not pay extra fees at premium locations, i.e. you can connect anywhere for the plan’s price, and no more. Only if you are on the Unlimited plan, and happen to come by one of the premium locations, you will pay the extra fee. Additionally, they will work on improving how the premium location fees are communicated to users, so as to not appear applicable to everyone. Their quick response is really appreciated, and the post will be ammended accordingly. I only wish they would have replied to an email I sent a couple of weeks ago requesting information about this, but in any case, the matter is clear now.

I was nicely surprised by a press release from Boingo, related to their offer of free WiFi connectivity to attendees of the Nokia World 2007 conference in Amsterdam, but when I read the end of the release, surprise turned to shock when I saw a not too well communicated statement:

If you search for WiFi locations on Boingo’s page, and for example, simply select ‘Spain’, the first results you see are these:

Note the ‘Premium Location – See details’ on each entry. If you click the details link, you are taken to this information page:

which informs you that the connection to this WiFi network will cost you $0.12 per minute, [Update: only if you are on the Unlimited plan].

This release caught my eye, as at Whisher we are working on a solution that will try to improve on this model, and give you convenient access at a very large number of locations (maybe even more than Boingo!). I cannot really blog about this yet, but I think if you use WiFi when traveling around, you will definitely like it.