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reducing iPhone data charges

This is not going to be a post about how cool the new iPhone 3G is. In some ways it is an amazing product but I don’t think another post like that is going to contribute anything further in this discussion. I wouldn’t say that the honeymoon is over, but I’m starting to feel a little more ambivalent towards the iPhone, at least how it is sold in Australia.

I think that the iPhone experience in Australia is going to be a little different than it's been in many other countries. The reason for this that the Australian mobile networks have fundamentally misunderstood the iPhone. They think it's a phone first and an internet device second, and have priced their plans accordingly with data limits laughably low.

There is no denying that the iPhone is a data hog. Some people are going to receive a very big shock when they receive their first bill for the iPhone, mainly because of excess data charges. The ACCC is sufficiently worried that it’s just issued a warning about this.

In this post I'm going to look at ways of reducing iPhone data consumption.

• Be careful of what you view in Safari. Safari is one of the iPhone's best applications, it is very nice to use with the ability to turn the phone for landscape browsing as well as zooming in and out when browsing web pages. But if you're anywhere near your bandwidth limits, using Safari for an extended browsing session on the iPhone is not a good idea.
• In particular be wary of newspaper websites and other bandwidth heavy sites. If you want to stay on top of the news, it's more data efficient to subscribe to that news source's RSS feeds rather than refreshing Safari on the website.
• If your carrier has any free unmetered web content, don't forget to make use of that if it's at all helpful (I know, often it's mediocre, but maybe it's better than nothing).
• If you want to read blogs on your iPhone, you really must use an RSS reader, unless you like the idea of paying more to your mobile phone company. Using an RSS reader strips out a lot of the junk which can increase your data usage. Don't click on outbound links if you can help it. If a post has some links you'd like to follow, mark the post (star in the Google Reader, “add to clippings” with NetNewsWire) and follow that up later on your home or work computer.
• Change the fetch new data settings to manual, so the iPhone only updates when you tell it to update and not on a regular schedule.
• Think about turning off email accounts at times when you’re not interested in reading or checking your email.
• MobileMe users: you may want to disable the push updating, unless you really need it
• Think about having a separate email account to use on the iPhone. You can set up automatic forwarding rules on your main email account, so that you only see the more important email on your iPhone and hopefully avoid the lolcats pictures and other large files being forwarded around
• Telstra and Optus users: make the most of any free wifi you may have access to in your plans.
• I love watching things on YouTube, but there's no way I'm ever going to look at YouTube on my iPhone unless I'm using "free" wifi. It's just not worth it.
  
• The iPhone supposedly has a way of tracking data consumption in Settings / General / Usage. I have found these figures to be wildly inaccurate, significantly less than the data consumption records kept by my carrier. Do not rely on that to track your data usage.

I write all of this with very mixed feelings, because right now it seems that occasionally  or regularly crippling the iPhone is the only economically sustainable way of using it. I hope this will eventually change, but in the mean time, it’s not so helpful to dwell on all the cool things the iPhone can do, focus on what you can afford.

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

[6 October 2007 update: This post has been followed up here]

The Australian Financial Review, nicknamed the Fin and sometimes AFR, is perhaps the newspaper of record for the Australian business sector. It used to have arrangements with aggregators such as Factiva, Media Monitors and NewsBank. At some point, it decided that it wasn't making enough money from licensing its content online in this way. In addition, the head of Fair Business Media, Michael Gill, was convinced that AFR content needed to be locked down, "because because one bank used an AFR article to support a prospectus." So AFR decided to develop its own platform for online access to its content and abruptly ended licenses with Factiva and the others.

There's was more information about the afr.com debacle in the second article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey called "Remember the glory days of AFR.com", but sadly that's in the pay section of Crikey and I can't link to that. So I thought I'd add my impressions of afr.com and thoughts about the whole process. I am the first to admit that what follows is not a thoughtful objective review, but a rant. The afr.com fiasco has been a major inconvenience to me and many of my co-workers and faculty and students at MPOW.

I tried out the new afr.com both in beta and since its release on a trial subscription. My first impressions of the beta product was that it was an absolute dog. The current release is better than what I saw in beta, but I still think the product is a dog.

The product has a flash-driven interface. This has a number of effects. It makes afr.com a real memory hog. For example, when I'm running Firefox for Windows I don't use it lightly. I have multiple tabs open, I have various web apps running and maybe the Firefox application is using 90 MB of RAM. When I'm running afr.com in Firefox, that number jumps to 250 MB. The other thing is that the application is very slow. Don't bother trying to do anything quickly in afr.com, especially typing or scrolling or clicking on buttons. The other "feature" of the flash-driven interface is that it's impossible to copy and paste text from afr.com. This is a part of their strategy to eliminate copyright infringement by treating paying customers as if they were thieves.

Even if one pays for a monthly subscription (the cheapest being $A 25/month), it is not an all you can eat package. Usage is metered with credits. It costs one credit to open an article. What struck me as tremendously stingy - or clueless - is that if you do a regular search on afr.com, you do not see any page numbers in the list of results. That exclusive information only appears once you choose to spend a credit to open the article. Don't they realize that page numbers are needed in most citation systems?

I was expecting that afr.com would, if nothing else, be a good way of reading the Fin online, similar to wsj.com, the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. But there seems no good way of browsing the current issue of the Fin in afr.com. The home page on afr.com seems to contain some articles from today’s paper, but it also contains links to other non-premium publications like Reuters or the Sydney Morning Herald – both of which can be viewed for free elsewhere. I've since learned that afr.com is different from the Digital Edition of the Australian Financial Review. The digital edition is only included with afr.com when people subscribe to the spendy ($A 150.00/month) advanced markets package. Compare that with wsj.com, that's available for $US 9.95/month [yesterday, that amounted to approximately $A 11.92].

I have one positive thing to say about afr.com. At least they bothered making it compatible with Macs. The product does work with Firefox and Safari, except that mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in either Mac browser.  For some reason, they use the most unreadable font for full-text articles in the Safari browser.

And what's with the advertising? I don't mind ads on products I use for free, e.g. Google or smh.com.au. But afr.com is priced as a premium product. I think that somebody paying for a clunky product should be spared from ads.

I doubt that this going to be a huge problem for me, seeing that I don't intend to use the product again, but the online help in afr.com is very poor. They are large glossy-looking slow-loading pdf files which look and read more like marketing pieces than online help. It's a microcosm of the problems with all of afr.com, they go for bling and end up with something slow and unusable.

Afr.com’s major flaw as a product is that it provides all sorts of miscellaneous research tools, as if it’s aspiring to become its customers new research portal, but it doesn’t provide cost effective (or effective in any shape or form) access to the frickin' newspaper, which is only thing that I think 95% of likely subscribers would care about. But that’s not the only flaw in play here. An esteemed colleague of mine is convinced that in a few years from now, there will be books and business case studies about this afr.com fiasco. How could a supposedly smart company get it so wrong in so many different ways?

I wonder if they thought they could get away with it because they thought, “we’re the Fin, the paper of record in the Australian business community, people will put up with this crap, because they need us.” The answer is no, if you make life too difficult and expensive for your customers, we’ll adapt to life without you. Some day you may realize that actually, it was you who needed the goodwill of your customers and suppliers – and try to win us back. That may work, but maybe by then we’ll have got used to not using the AFR at all.

[14 June 2007 edit: I wrote something else about afr.com here]

when you need to forget the answer to remember the question

If you pride yourself on being competent at finding information, please skip this post. This post is for people who know they screw up sometimes. Oh and by the way, competency can be overrated!

when the internet is down

I'm not usually one to apologize for lack of updates, but I feel that an explanation is in order for the last month. It seems that there is some ongoing issue with my local phone exchange at Springwood, which has been causing intermittent outages in my ADSL connection. At least this is if I believe my ISP, who swear that the problem is caused by the phone lines, not by them.

It's amazing how a thing like this can put a spanner in the works, particularly in my blogging. It's very frustrating to think of a post and not be able to write or post it. It's not the same to draft something offline and then post it later, because often for me, writing and reading and research all go together. If I can't check sources and make links while I'm writing, I don't feel that I'm really writing a blog post - at the most drafting a post offline is like preparation for writing a post.

At least for me, every idea for a post only has a certain window of time to be published, and when that time expires, it is usually time to move on, even if it seemed like a really good idea originally. Things change, and what was interesting a month ago may seem a little stale if it's posted tomorrow.

Anyway, because it's such an almighty pain for me when the internet is down at home and I have no idea when it will return, I have arranged for limited dialup internet access as a backup. It's slow but at least it's reliable.

mobile phones in libraries question

The new MBA students are having their orientation week at MPOW. My question is: Do I come down hard on them whenever I see one using a mobile phone in the library, so that they get used to this policy from the beginning? Or do I follow my inclination to reinterpret this policy to be against disruptive noise in general and so excuse brief and quiet mobile phone conversations?

one of my favourite mods, Ultima V: Lazarus for Dungeon Siege

Dungeon Siege (2002) was an ok-ish game. I liked the free form class system - where characters would specialize according to the ways they used their abilities. The mule for carrying extra equipment and loot was an inspired invention. The music and the landscapes were well done, as were the goblins with machine guns and flamethrowers - except that there were too many of them. But it was ultimately a generic and repetitive hack and slash game with a threadbare plot.

But today I am extremely glad that I have a copy of it, because it enables me to play Ultima V: Lazarus (which I'll be referring to as just Lazarus), which recently been finished for the Mac.

The original Ultima V was published in 1988 on the Apple II. It was not good timing for a game's posterity, because at this time people were already replacing their Apple IIs and Commodore 64s for Macintoshes and PCs.

One of the developers of Lazarus explains the reason for re-making the game:

We're doing Ultima V specifically, rather than, say, IV or VI, for three basic reasons:

First, U5 is old enough that its technology is completely obsolete. Ultima VI-IX are still "playable" with today's computers, but V and those that came before it are very outdated.

Second, no one has ever created any patches or upgrades for it. Ultimas I, III, and IV have all at least been patched, if not completely remade.

Finally, I feel that Ultima V has the greatest potential for expansion of all the early Ultima games--its story is rich, its characters are interesting, and its environments are begging to be seen in modern graphics. [official u5lazarus.com web site, in the FAQ section]

Lazarus is actually a mod for the Dungeon Siege game. It's a very inspired combination - mixing a 2 dimensional turn-based game with well-written characters and a rich story into a 3D real-time game engine.

Lazarus is freeware, but a copy of Dungeon Siege (not Dungeon Siege 2) is needed to use the mod. It is definitely a labor of love. It must have been a massive job. I feel that it's unfortunate yet understandable that it took so long to finish, seeing that Dungeon Siege has been superseded and might not be so easy to find these days. I have only just started exploring this game, but have been impressed by the music and interactions between the different characters. It compares very favourably with modern games, and seems to have a maturity which many of them are lacking.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia entry on Ultima V: Lazarus
• Review of Lazarus
• Lazarus wiki

customer service by chat

So I've just moved. Until I have broadband internet access set up at my new place, please excuse if I'm slow at replying to emails, moderating comments or indeed reading many blog posts. As well as all the unpacking and setting things up for a new household, I am also trying to get reconnected at home.

Seeing that I don't enjoy making (or receiving) phone calls to call centres, I thought that I'd try out the chat system offered by one of the bigger players in the Australian telco market. Big waste of time.

Things were going ok up until the point when I checked to see if they supported Macs - knowing before that they used to have issues with Macs. Just after telling me that Mac OS 10.4 should be ok, the customer service rep. asked me, "which version of windows does it have?" I explained, patiently and tactfully I hope, how that wasn't relevant.

There was a pause for several minutes - and then the chat session was abrubtly ended. I can only assume that he hung up on me. It's a bit of a worry.

I am asking myself - did I waste as much time this way as I would have if I'd phoned them, waited on hold for 5-10 minutes, and then spoken to the same clueless person over the phone? Maybe not, but I am guessing that it would have been easier for me to ask for this person's supervisor as soon as I started having doubts about his expertise. Also, if my experience at Vodafone is anything to go by, it's very rare for a call centre operator to be allowed to hang up on a customer. We were only allowed to do it when they started swearing at us and we had warned them that we would not put up with that sort of language. Released calls were monitored and counted, just like everything else, and always had to be justified. Maybe the online chatting is still so new that it's not monitored as vigourously.

Which is quite short-sighted - after all it would be very difficult for me to post an audio recording (or even transcript) of a call centre exchange on the web - but it was very easy to take a screen shot and post this on the web. It makes me think about virtual reference in libraries too - with a different medium comes different expectations and standards.

using Gmail as a research cache

For some people, the process of research is very organized and methodical. For me research is something creative and instinctive, slightly chaotic and usually a bit messy. I am not saying that one way is better. I know that there are distinct disadvantages to my method, such as the possibility of finding a really good source through some odd combination of luck and insight - only to lose it, never to find it again because of being disorganized. So I've been looking at better ways to be organized - but not in a way which slows me down and causes me to lose my momentum. For me, research is the closest that I'll ever get to hunting. One of the things I like about it is the chase, which is why I hate things which slow me down

I have set up a separate Gmail account for my work and use it as a cache of my research. As I come across articles and sources which seem promising, what I do is compose a new email, paste in the full text and citation/URL of the article and then save it as a draft. It's a very quick process, and so I'm able to move on. The nice thing is that because Gmail is searchable, everything in this research cache is searchable - making it easy to return to the documents to dig more deeply and hone in on what is useful. It doesn't work so well with pdfs, but I can still upload the pdf and store the citation and/or URL. The other nice thing is that I can add to and search this cache whether I'm in my office or at the shared computer on our reference desk.

I am quite confident that because this research cache is personal - and can only be used by me - and because it's do with my work which is for academic purposes, that in most cases, it would be all right. To be absolutely sure, I would need to check all of the license agreements of all of the database which I am likely to use.

Currently playing in iTunes: Benzin by Rammstein

to run ahead

I'm sorry for not replying earlier to the comments on my previous post. I've been wanting to, but then some other things happened. Enough time has passed and this comment has lengthened to the extent that it might as well be another post.

CW: I almost wrote something in my final paragraph about the presentation which you did last week. As an illustration of a good thing. People who are enthusiastic and try to educate and get people excited about using these services are of are absolutely vital to the profession. This opinion is so widespread amongst librarian bloggers that it barely needs saying, but I want to say it anyway. On the other hand, I'm more interested a point that is slightly more controversial. I think that we also need the contrary voices. It should be ok to be sceptical without being called obstructionist or luddite. It should  be ok to say, "Yes, but what about this problem?" This dialogue can be extremely difficult, but it has to happen. I'm learning in my new job is that when implementing new technology in the workplace, the technology is the easier stuff (even when it's being very difficult). The harder stuff is working with people to accept and actually support the changes. A part of me would like to run ahead and be in the revolution, leaving these slow coaches behind - but that's neither possible nor desirable for me. So I decide that I might as well welcome this challenge, knowing that this collaboration will make the final result more solid and better supported in the workplace - and probably prevent me from making some dreadful mistakes.

Please excuse this American western pioneer analogy. Like an annoying song, it won't leave my head until I've written it down. There are some people are make good scouts, they're quick and they can explore these strange new lands we're heading into, understand what's going on and then communicate this to the rest of us. Other people are better at maintaining the wagons and the horses and keeping everything alive and moving - albeit much slower than the scouts. Others are more in touch with the past than the future - their role is to remind us of who we are and how we came to be in this situation. ((I wouldn't be able to say which I would be, maybe a hybrid, like a short-range scout)) Problems only happen when somebody decides that their role is the most important. At one extreme is deciding that the scouts should stop their scouting and be forced to do all their work around the camps, that the future doesn't matter any more. The other extreme is the scouts declaring that everybody should be just like them, ditch the wagons and sprint into the wilderness where the promised land awaits, ready to solve all their problems.

Angel: Like you, I never planned on writing another post about this, but it just happened. Your point about Generation X as a bridge generation was very well made. Of course, it's a given that any statement about generational differences involves over generalizations - but that doesn't mean the topic should be taboo. I had been wondering if this web 2.0 backlash might be more of a Generation X reaction - we were fairly cynical to start with. Then came the dot com bubble and crash - and we now we are seeing similarities between the hype from the late 1990s and Web 2.0, and this worries us.

Walt: Thanks for your comment. Speaking for myself, I think that my positions have become less confrontational as this discussion has continued here and in other places. From sarcastic satire, to a serious rant to why can't we all just get along? My views are often a moving target. That's why I'm better off blogging. I imagine if I wrote a book, my thoughts at the end of the process would be totally different from what I was thinking at the beginning.

my first phish email

I received my very first phish email. Here's how it went (and I had to retype this, because the text was actually an image):

During our regular accounts verification, it has come to our attention that your account details might be out of date or incomplete. This irregularity must be fixed by logging on to your * [I'm not naming the financial institution] Online Access account. This procedure is performed one time only and it does not require further actions on the customer side. After the account has been confirmed by logging in, your regular daily actions on * website can be continued. Follow the link below to login:

[realistic looking URL]

In our efforts to offer a competitive service and maintain a reliable database server, we are performing a regular monthly update on every account enrolled with us.

This is an automated message , no reply or confirmation is required on the customer side.

© FI. Use of the information contained on this page is governed by Australian law.

The design of the email was totally convincing - it could have been written from the FI's style guide. For a half a second I thought about going along with it, after all I have changed my address and have been meaning to tell them about this for some time. Then I remembered the golden rule against phishing: financial institutions never send these emails to their customers.

I rang them and they confirmed that they hadn't sent it. So I forwarded the email to their security section and reported the email to Google as well (Gmail has a report phishing option).

Just last night I had been reading about spear-phishing, where particular individuals are targetted because of the wealth or information which they possess. I'm doubting that spear-phishers would ever go after me, which is just as well, because regular phishing is annoying enough.