September 2011 archive

Sep 13

Video: My Talk on "How IPv6 Will Kill Telecom" from eComm2011

At eComm 2011 this year, I spoke on "How IPv6 Will Kill Telecom - And What We Need To Do About It". I enjoyed giving the talk and have received great feedback about the session (including being asked to give a similar session at other conferences). Organizer Lee Dryburgh has now posted the video:

If you are interested in learning more about IPv6, I put together an IPv6 Resource Page over on Voxeo's Speaking of Standards blog. Enjoy!

P.S. And yes, those of you who have seen previous videos of my presentations will note that my running has paid off... :-)

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 09

Today Is The Last Chance To Enter The 2011 SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards

SncrlogoToday, September 9, 2011, is the last day to submit your entry to the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) Excellence in New Communications Awards:
The Society’s prestigious awards program honors individuals, corporations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and media outlets that are innovating the use of social media and Internet communications technologies (ICT) in the areas of business, media, journalism and professional communications, entertainment, education, social initiatives, government and politics.

If you would like to be considered, please submit your entry TODAY. Winners will be honored at the Annual SNCR Research Symposium & Awards Gala at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, on November 3rd and 4th, 2011.

I'm looking forward to learning from this year's winners!

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 08

Awesome 1954 Bell System Video – How To Dial Your (Rotary) Phone

Started off this morning getting a great laugh out of this classic 1954 Bell System video tweeted out by Larry Cannell. Amazing to think back to the time when the system was changing from just picking up the phone and speaking with an operator to a new system where you "dialed" the phone.

Really the start of the self-service automation of the phone network that we take for granted today.

Fascinating to see the glimpses, too, of the "internal networks" as they "pulled the fuses" from the manual systems and flipped switches on the dial systems. I love the guys pointing a "Go!" finger at the teams to make the transitions!

Of course, you have to wonder how many young people growing up today in the United States have even seen a true rotary dial phone! (We who used them should write down some of our memories before they are forgotten...)

Anyway, enjoy this window into a different time:

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 07

How Will The Internet Evolve? An audio recording of a recent panel offers chilling ideas…

IsocHow will the Internet evolve over the years ahead?

What are the most pressing challenges for the evolution of the Internet?

That was the topic of a recent panel discussion sponsored by the Internet Society held at a recent Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Quebec City in July 2011. Being a strong advocate for an open Internet, I found myself listening to the audio recording on a recent car trip... and admittedly found myself rather concerned by the challenges outlined by the panel participants.

With the Internet no longer being simply the "research network" it once was and now being "critical infrastructure", it's a vastly different world with both commercial and government interests wanting to control the network. What are the competing interests? Where is it all going? What may we lose in the evolution?

The session lasted for about 45 minutes and is definitely worth a listen if you are interested in where this critical network known as the Internet is heading...

P.S. Slides are also available, but they are just a few slides served to frame the discussion - the meat of the subject is all in the audio recording.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 07

Video: Chris Pirillo to Emcee Voxeo’s Customer Summit, Oct 10-12

As I mentioned previously, Voxeo's annual Customer Summit 2011 is coming up October 10-12 in Orlando, Florida. One of the latest bits of news is that Internet entrepreneur and über-geek Chris Pirillo will be the emcee for the event. He recently recorded this video intro talking about his upcoming trip to Orlando:

Chris is a high-energy and highly entertaining guy... and it will be fun to see him in action at the event!

P.S. If you want to attend Voxeo's Customer Summit 2011, space is filling up quickly but there are still a few slots open - register today!

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 07

Amusing Video Tutorial: Let’s Suck at Github Together

If you want to learn more about using git and Github, or are a fan/user of git/Github (as I am) and want to pass along a video tutorial for others to see, you may enjoy this episode from Chris Coyier entitled “CSS-Tricks #101: Let’s Suck at GitHub Together“. As you can tell from the title, Chris doesn’t mind poking some fun at his own abilities – and his own aversion to the command-line and preference for GUI utilities.

For me personally, I’m rather “old skool” and typically prefer the command-line, but I appreciate that many people don’t… and I enjoyed Chris’ entertaining episode. Sure, as some commenters noted, there were a few minor inaccuracies/faults… but overall it did the job well in helping introduce people to what git and Github together can do. I can’t embed the video here, but if you click on the image below you’ll be taken to his site where you can view the episode…

Csstricks github video

And if you are over on Github, you can follow me there as github.com/danyork.

Sep 07

Running A Half-Marathon – One Year After Starting Running!

I did it!

On September 4, 2011, I ran the 13.1 miles of the Swanzey Covered Bridges Half-Marathon!

Swanzeyhalfmarathon 2011

I came in at about 2 hours, 27 minutes for an average of 11:16 per mile.

More on that in a moment, but I thought I'd mention that one driver for me to do this particular race was because the first time I recorded a run on my iPhone was September 7th, 2010. Here it was...

Sept72010

1.6 miles! And a year later here I am at 13.1. I'm admittedly pleased with how that has worked out!

In truth, though, I had been doing some running earlier in August 2010 using my Garmin GPS "watch", which I actually still use as a double-check with the iPhone. I was amused to see courtesy of Facebook's new "On This Day in 2010" feature this juxtaposition:

Oneyearlater

It's been quite a journey... and amazing to see what happens when you just keep on doing something day after day after day.

Now, as to this past weekend's half-marathon, it turned out to be quite a humid morning. We've had spectacular weather in recent weeks, with beautiful sunny days, temperatures in the mid-70s Fahrenheit and with almost no humidity.

Sunday was not one of those days.

I made the classic mistake of starting out WAY too fast! Caught up in the pack of people, I was running up about 8 minutes/mile, which is faster than even the fastest 5K I'd run! Not sustainable... and I dropped it back a bit... but not far enough... and the pace graphic below shows how that hit me in the last few miles:

Swanzeyhalf2011 distance Swanzeyhalf pace

Indeed, that red part in the upper right of the image is where I walked from the 12 mile aid station until about 12.25 miles or so when I willed myself to get back underway to finish the final mile.

The race itself was quite beautiful to run. It started off going through a covered bridge and then onto about 2 miles of trail running along an old railroad bed that's now a trail. When the course returned to the road it took us through parts of Swanzey I'd never known about and through three more covered bridges. It was admittedly fun to run through those purely because I'd never done so before.

After laughing at someone pulling out their phone and taking a picture of the first bridge, I did have to do the same for the next three:

Swanzeybridge1

Swanzeybridge2 Swanzeybridge4 1

The race had a good bit of roads through wooded areas and all in all was quite beautiful to run. There were "aid stations" set up every 2 miles or so with water and/or Gatorade and while I ran with a belt with water bottles, I also drank from all of the aid stations. They were much appreciated and some of the folks staffing the stations had fun costumes, music, etc., which was enjoyable to see.

When the race was over, I was definitely tired... and I didn't do a whole lot of walking the remainder of the day. But the next day I was back out walking a 5K with the family and have felt pretty decent since that time.

Would I do it again? Definitely. Do I have any interest in going further and running a full marathon? Not right now... although I won't rule that out. That just seems like a huge time commitment... and hard to practice for with small kids in one's life.

But I'll do another half... ;-)

Swanzeyhalf2011

P.S. Thanks go to my wife for taking these photos of me coming in to the finish area.

UPDATE: The race results are up on CoolRunning.com and it turns out that I was 171st out of the the 203 runners - and 24th of the 26 runners in my age range (male 40s).

Sep 07

Video: What’s New in Voxeo Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11?

Want to know the newest ways to build communications apps using Voxeo products? Want to know about IPv6, wideband audio, fax support and large-scale management of servers?

In a recent Voxeo Developer Jam Session, I explained what is new in Voxeo's Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11 and how you can use them to build even larger-scale communications apps than before.

The session is available for download, as are the slides. It is also available for viewing on YouTube. If you don't know anything about Voxeo, this is also a great way to learn more about its core products.

Oh, and when you're down watching, you can download Prophecy 11 or VoiceObjects 11 for free for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. :-)

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 06

John Battelle On The Importance of Aggregating The Digital Content We Post In Walled Gardens

The Internet Is Open
As we spread our digital content across the Internet, through separate services that we do NOT control, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Quora, how do we aggregate all that information somewhere where we DO control the content? So as to preserve our "identity" formed by that collective work?

That is at the heart of John Battelle's great piece yesterday, "We Need An Identity Re-Aggregator (That We Control). I've written at some length over the years about the re-emergence of online "walled gardens" and the need for us to maintain our own identity on the web. I've also spoken about this on any number of FIR reports I've submitted... and to me John really nails it with this paragraph:

The downsides of not owning your own words, on your own platform, are not limited simply to money. Over time, the words and opinions one leaves all over the web form a web of identity - your identity - and controlling that identity feels, to me, a human right. But unless you are a sophisticated netizen, you're never going to spend the time and effort required to gather all your utterances in one place, in a fashion that best reflects who you are in the world.

As he notes further on in the piece, even if you link to your contributions on one of those services, should that service disappear all your content is lost.

Over the past few months, I've been trying to change my behavior a bit and revert my own writing to how it used to be. I'm trying to post messages on my own blogs FIRST and then linking to it from the other services.

Even this post... I could have left it as a comment on John's blog, or as a reply inside of Facebook or Google+... but instead I am posting it here it is on a platform that I control.

It's hard... the various services make it seductively convenient just to have all your interaction within the walls of that service. And I certainly do have some level of conversation within those walls. But for longer content - or commentary that I want to preserve, even in the form of links to other sites with some comment, I'm trying to do more of that from my own sites. Kind of like how "blogging" was back about 5+ years ago before we got all caught up in these new shiny services that we all enjoy so much.

Meanwhile, I, too, would love to have a "meta service" along the lines of what John suggests...

Image credit: jeremybrooks on Flickr

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 06

Skype Now Using "@SkypeSupport" on Twitter

Given that last week I received two more phone calls from people looking to speak with Skype, I was very pleased to learn that Skype has recently started providing a support channel via Twitter - @SkypeSupport. Sure, it's not a phone line - which probably means I'll still be Skype's unofficial receptionist, but at least now I have another channel to send people to in addition to Skype's community forums.

Skype support on twitter

Great to see Skype providing this channel to support customers.

P.S. Jim Courtney noted last month on his site that Skype also now has a Facebook page for customer support as well

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either: