UNRENOWNED

I’ve been using Google Voice for a few weeks now. It’s pretty slick.

It’s come in handy while in a meeting when someone leaves a voice message. I can read the transcription of the message via email and/or text message. The problem is that the transcription isn’t always very good. Most times I can get the gist of what is being said but other times it’s a lost cause.

Here’s a message I received tonight. The transcription is followed by the actual message for comparison.

Yeah. What’s up. What’s Brian man’s give you hit alright. Anyways to this, the hot holler at me when you get a chance man just checking in on you. I’ve left please.

It sounded like there was a yawn in there and it’s not super clear but the transcription is decent.

For those of you who have used Google Voice let me know about your experience.

I’m a huge fan of VirtualBox. Unfortunately, Windows is a neccessary evil that I have to deal with in order to manage my iPod Touch. VirtualBox has made this possible with the least amount of pain.

I used to use VMware but VirtualBox had all the options that i needed to create and manage virtual machines without the added cost of the VMware product. It was a no-brainer. The only problem I have with VirtualBox is that I can’t manage my Blackberry from my Windows guest machine. The Blackberry doesn’t register via the USB to the guest machine like my iPod Touch does. So, I have to use an actual Windows machine in order to do my Blackberry updates.

When VMware came out with its free VMware Player in 2005 you could only run exiting virtual machines and not create new. However, VMware just announced the latest version of VMware Player will no longer be restricted. VMware Player 3.0 will have the ability to create and edit virtual machines just like the workstation version.

Some other highlights to VMware player 3.0 include:

• Aero support for Windows 7 and Windows Vista guests
• OpenGL support for Windows guests
• Automatically download and install the latest VMware Tools package
• Multiple monitor support
• Print from your VM without installing printer drivers
• ALSA Sound support on Linux hosts enables multiple VMs to play sound concurrently

from: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/player

VMware Player 3.0 is now in beta. I plan to check it out to see how it works for me. If it doesn’t end up giving me any new advantages, VirtualBox will continue to be my tool of choice.

I’ve been called a paranoid person. I can also tend to be a little obsessive compulsive. It may take me longer to accomplish some tasks because I have to double and triple check what I’m doing but this has also helped me out in various situations.

Case in point is that I backup my computer and my Blackberry regularly. If anything happens to either of these devices, the world as I know it would stop but only momentarily. I’ve learned my lesson over the years and I’ve seen catastrophic things happen to others.

Sidekick users experienced one of these catastrophes recently. The Sidekick is a trendy messaging phone produced by a subsidiary of Microsoft and available from T-Mobile. While doing a hardware upgrade, the Sidekick service was interrupted for almost 4 days.

This really isn’t the big news. Carriers tend to have outages every once in a while. This was a long outage but only the tip of the iceberg. The outage has also resulted in the loss of personal data stored on Sidekicks. Email, contacts, messages and etc. are lost for thousands of customers. My bad…

It seems that the Sidekick servers were not backed up or the backups no longer functioned. As a service provider, we expect for our data to be safe but if you truly care about your data, you should be taking matters into your own hands. Make sure that you have a local backup…just in case.

Mr. Paranoid here does a Blackberry backup twice a week. I use Dropbox to copy this backup to Dropbox as well as the other computers where I have dropbox installed. So, I have three backups in three geographically different places. I’ve been told that it’s over kill and unnecessary but you won’t find me creating a Facebook group asking everyone to send me their contact information because something happened to my device.

Now brace yourself. I’m going to do something that I don’t do very often. I have to give some props to Apple and the way they’ve implemented the iPhone and iPod Touch. Each time you sync these devices, iTunes automatically does a backup. This is arguably a little better than my manual process. (This is a local backup only but I hope it wouldn’t take much to copy it somewhere else in case something happens to that machine.

The moral of the story is make backups and don’t trust anyone to do it for you.

More info at PC World.

As a follow up to my post from yesterday. Check out Richard Johnson’s blog post about the Global Jam.

That’s right, just like Chicago and their Olympic bid, the Global Jam has been olyminated! We spent the better part of 6 plus hours teaching quite a few new faces how to get involved in the Ubuntu Community. We covered everything from filing a bug to triaging that sucker, and even covered the packaging as well. We went over, in pretty good detail what all is involved with packaging as well as breaking down the files that are required and important for Debian and Ubuntu packaging. Typically our events are a lot of the same faces, however this time we went for a suburban Chicago feel for the get together and this collected a bunch of new faces. Awesome, as Jorge would say. Everyone of them was interested in learning how to contribute too. Hey Matt East, keep your eye out for my buddy Vaughn, he is interested in some Ubuntu docs! I know we will have a few more MOTU, or Ubuntu Developers, or whatever it will be called soon, hailing from Chicago. This rocks! During all of the instructing we actually triaged a bug, one bug! Of course it was a KDE bug too, go figure! Nonetheless, it was very productive and I feel we will have new contributors from Chicago in the near future as well. Anyways, here are just a couple of photos from the ones that I took:

Went to my first Ubuntu Global Jam today headed up by Richard Johnson (@nixternal).

To the uninitiated, the Ubuntu Global Jam is a global event for the Ubuntu community to come together to work to improve Ubuntu. The designated time was October 2-4, 2009. Events took place all over the world so that existing contributors can meet with other contributors as well as people who would like to learn more about how they can help the Ubuntu movement. Each event cover topics including:

Bugs – Find, Triage and Fix Bugs
Testing – Test new releases and report feedback
Documentation – Write documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community
Translations – Translate Ubuntu and help to make it available in everyone’s local language.
Packaging – Work on Ubuntu packages and improve them.

It was a good outing for me to attend. We spent time going through various topics. I think I’ll be looking into how I can contribute with bugs, testing or documentation. We spent a considerable time on packaging, which was way over my head.

Wish there was a Linux User Group (LUG) near my house that I could attend. I may try going to the Chicago LUG.

Learn more about the Ubuntu Global Jam