Here’s my $0.02 (and then some).

The idea behind this is to identify (and punish) the high bandwidth users. Comcast (and other broadband companies) have skated by for years on this “bucket-of-bits” concept where you buy a bucket of bits (we’ve all seen the UPTO 16MB commercials). This is a whole additional discussion which I don’t want to get into here, but in short I refer to that advertisement as fraudband.

So with this bucket-of-bits concept you pay a monthly fee for a connection and you use it as much as you want. The problem is that the *more* you use it, the *less* the provider makes for your usage. This is an upside down business model and I’ve tried to think of other companies that are incented to sell you a product that you shouldn’t use (help me out by commenting if you know of a successful business model that follows this upside down paradigm (and don’t say cell phone companies)).

What they are doing by opening this door is saying that your monthly fee (let’s say it’s $34.99) is good for upto 250GB of usage. If you exceed this amount you will get less traffic or have to pay an additional fee. But what happens for those *good* broadband users who don’t use their allocated 250GB? Do they get to a refund on the unused portion of their bits? How about roll-over bits?

If the formula is $34.99 for upto 250GB of data … can I pay upto $34.99 for what I actually use?

I work from home and as such am probably one of the heavier users. I also watch Netflix on demand on my TV via my TivoHD XL. I rent online movies from Amazon as well. I use Vonage. I don’t do it regularly (as it makes my VoIP phone almost unusable), but I have been known to share files via P2P and download a lot of content from non P2P sites as well.

My guess is that I’m a heavier user and that I’d exceed the upto usage, but when I don’t I will be doing everything I can to get credited for what I didn’t use in a particular month.

What’s amazing about the numbers is that 15% more adults are watching online videos than using social networking sites. Another number that’s amazing is the “near-universal” use by 18-29 year olds (old media beware).

I work with a lot of communities who still think that “broadband” is just high-speed internet and nothing more (which granted, all this online video viewing is occurring over today’s broadband). I often coach them on the fact that broadband will deliver all of your telecom services in the future including services we don’t even know about yet as well as those we do (like cable TV, telephone, etc.).  As more and more folks experience video online, they will pressure their local community leaders to become active in promoting broadband availability and broadband adoption so that they can experience the same services that those of us who live in more urban or suburban areas do.

Personally, I watch videos on my TV over Netflix from my Tivo, but also have a MythTV computer acting as a video server where I have ripped most of my DVDs and downloaded (mostly legal) videos.  I also watch plenty of youtube, google video and plenty of old media sites (like comedy central).

If you don’t have broadband, why not?  Is it too expensive or is it not available?  If it’s not available, contact your local elected officials and ask what they are doing to bring broadband to your area. It’s not just for browsing the web anymore and has serious economic development impacts on your locality.

For a brief introduction, Google Voice is a telephone number that is supposed to be your last and final telephone number. You set up Google Voice with your other phone numbers and then you can control how and when you accept calls from who. Sounds great, but let me provide an example which may make more sense. You set up your Google Voice number to send everyone in a “Work” or “Coworkers” group to your office phone number and your cell phone number during week days from 8am-7pm, but not your home number, but you have one particular work buddy that likes to call you on weekends so you make an exception for that individual, but only for your cell phone. You never give out your cell phone number (or any other number) and Google Voice “screens” your calls.

It also has some cool features like

• transferring calls between your phones (say you are on the phone at work, but have tickets to a Bob Dylan show and need to transfer that call to your cell phone so you can finish the call in the car (not that you should talk on the phone while driving)).
• transcribing voicemail messages and sending you a SMS
• announcing your calls when you answer the phone and allowing you to accept or not (again depending on groups, or individuals) and allowing you to send a caller to voicemail (and even listen in on their message and interrupting (remember the good old days with old school answering machines that did that and we used to talk to them (“If your home, pick up.”)))
• recording calls in progress
• sending/receiving SMS messages
• making international calls for decent rates
• when using a computer, you can make calls from Google Voice by entering a number or clicking on a contact and the phone of your choice rings, you pick it up, and then the number you are calling rings…the Caller-ID they see is your Google Voice number
• the interface is very much like gmail, and I expect when it’s opened up, it’s a simple process of selecting your number and it will be fully integrated in gmail (and since Talk is already integrated it’s only a matter of time)

So, why would I have beef with AT&T and Apple? I’m getting to it, but what’s happening is that Google Voice is basically commoditizing voice (like yahoo, hotmail, and gmail commoditized e-mail and unchained you from your ISP) or at least commoditizing how to reach you. If you don’t have to give out your cell phone number (or home phone, or office phone) ever again then there is nothing that tethers you to their services (yeah yeah, I know about number portability) and you can switch carriers or use alternative channels (like your home phone or even VoIP (which I’m sure is in the works for Google Voice (Talk?)).

From what I understand, “there’s an app for that.” It’s already written and I’ve even seen a demo of it on an internet video site. However, AT&T and Apple have blocked the app. It works something like the web page and it would drive your address book and initiate all your calls through the app.  You would click on a name or number and it would dial that and present your Google Voice Caller-ID to the recipient.  But it’s still using the cellular network so it’s not really about the voice minutes. Rather, I think Apple is concerned that someone else is driving the “dialing experience.”  I think that is the perceived threat to both Apple and AT&T.  It’s aggravating because for all the appearance of “openness” this app didn’t pass the muster of either AT&T or Apple or both.

There are some of the tech savvy who think this is a big enough rub that they are leaving the iPhone and going to Android or Palm Pre or even Crackberries as there are apps for all of those (I’m not certain on the Palm Pre, so leave a comment if you know of one). Personally, I still love my iPhone. I honestly think it’s an awesome phone, and with all those apps and other features, I still haven’t seen anything that’s close. The Palm Pre is up there, but it’s still lacking in some areas (namely apps which if it has a Google Voice App is kind of ironic). I will be one of those who complains (like this blog and it’s subsequent tweet) so hopefully AT&T and Apple will get the message (and I’m sure it’s already being aired in the Apple boardroom).

Don’t have Google Voice? Just request an invite. It will come in a week or so.

She asked that I help her with some changes, but when I started making suggestions she was reluctant to include my changes in her article because the audience had never heard of “web2.0″ and were more concerned with the loss of prescriptions as a profit center to 1800petmeds.com.

I was taking the angle that the practices, universities, and other vet professions (like drug sales (e.g. 1800petmeds.com)) that aren’t taking advantage of new advertising media (e.g. social networking, viral marketing, etc.) would lose to those that do. I’m not an expert in the field, but even I see the changes that these technologies are causing in my business and my company is trying to find way to use them to our benefit.

Additionally, as clients get younger a yellow pages advertisement just doesn’t go as far as it used to. A friend of mine recently complained that his children couldn’t find something on the Internet when it was easy to find in the yellow pages and they just didn’t even think to look their first (or even second).

I think that most successful practices at this point do have Web sites, but do they allow e-mail appointments or respond to e-mails?

Should veterinarians start Facebook groups for their clients, blog on the latest epidemic in their regions, tweet suggested reading or even reminders for annual vaccines. Better yet, if they don’t will they lose out to those that do? After all, it’s a profession that is based upon a veterinarian-patient-client relationship and relationships are moving into cyberspace whether or not the practicing veterinarians want that or not.

I’d be happy to get some perspective from either veterinarians or cognoscenti in social media and new forms of advertising.

To be honest, the solution was all over the forums, but none of the posts specifically mentioned the 901. I spent a few hours trying different things and eventually got the settings about where I want them. The trick was that all the steps in this post need to be followed. The post indicates that this works for the 900 as well, but YMMV.

The trackpad seems responsive, yet not overly so,  it’s not jumpy (as it was with just the elantech driver), and I even have both vertical scrolling on the side of the trackpad and two finger scrolling as well.

Here’s the steps that I performed (these are pretty much identical to the post, but I’ve added some dialog):

The first step is to enable the driver module in the kernel. To do this create a file in /etc/modprobe.d called eeepc and enter the following line in the file:

options psmouse elantech=1

I rebooted for the module to load. I noticed upon rebooting that the mouse was very jittery and it was hard to make small moves.

Next I created a file named shmconfig.fdi in /etc/hal/fdi/policy and entered in the following text:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″?>
<deviceinfo version=”0.2″>
<device>
<match key=”info.product” string=”ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad”>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.SHMConfig” type=”string”>True</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_driver” type=”string”>synaptics</merge>
</match>
</device>
<device>
<match key=”info.linux.driver” string=”psmouse”>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.SHMConfig” type=”string”>True</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

I rebooted again to load the driver in gnome. The trackpad was still jittery, but I was now able to adjust sensitivity in Prefereneces -> Mouse. I also noticed that I had lost two finger scrolling at this point.

Now, to fix the tap while typing problem you have to run the following command (which will run as a deamon):

syndaemon -i 0.7 -d -t -K

Now the tapping while typing problem is no more. To run this command on gnome startup you can put it in the session manager by running gnome-session-properties from the command line and entering the following:

Name: Synadaemon
Command: syndaemon -i 0.7 -d -t -K
Comment: Disables touchpad 0.7 second while typing

As such:

[View with PicLens]

Now that I had the typing and tapping issue solved, I wanted to get the two finger controls back. To do this you need to install the installed gsynaptics-elantech package through apt-get or synaptic. Once installed two finger scrolling works and there is a new application in Preferences with which you can configure the touchpad to your specifications.

Happy typing with no tapping

I’ll attempt to describe all that I had to do to get it installed and go into some of the customizations or additions I’ve made and why.

Installing Eeebuntu was not very difficult but I did have a few challenges and even did a re-install to change the default partitioning to use both SSD drives.

The first problem I came across was that I could not boot from the USB stick I created using another Ubuntu box I had which is running 8.10. I changed the settings in the BIOS to boot from the USB stick first, but it still wasn’t booting. I read online that if you press ESC during the initial splash screen that you can choose the boot device, which is true. However, even when I did that and selected the USB stick it still wouldn’t boot from the USB stick.

I had an old PC that I was cannibalizing for parts and I had a USB to IDE adapter (which has come in handy before), so I took the old DVD player out of my old PC and used that to install Eeebuntu NBR (2.0).

During the install, the GUI in which you make all your selections in is larger than the screen so the Back and OK buttons can not be reached. That was  easy to overcome, but is nevertheless a minor annoyance.

My first install was just accepting the defaults and went very smooth. The machine came up clean and I poked around for a while. The main issue I had with the default install and using the “Guided” partition setup is that it installed  the entire system on the larger of the two SSD drives on the system (the 901 Linux version comes with two SSD drives, a 4GB and a 16GB). It didn’t even format or mount the second SSD. I decided that I would reinstall the system and put everything but the /home directory (and swap) on the 4GB drive. I also called my local PC store and they said that a 2GB upgrade for my EeePC was only $34.99 so I ran out and picked up the memory.

The memory install was a snap and not even worth going into.

For the second install I put the / mount point on the entire 4GB disk, created a 15GB primary partition for the /home directory and left the remainder of the second SSD drive for swap in a logical partition (I think it was just under 1GB).

The first problem I came across was during the system update, I was getting a message that some of the repositories had an unknown public key and therefore were not being updated. I think this was an oversight of the Eeebuntu repository so I did some searching and determined that I had to add the key for that repository:

sudo gpg --armor --export <INSERT KEY HERE> | sudo apt-key add -

After this, all updates completed successfully.

I have to say that I really like NBR launcher. It’s slick and easy to customize. It works very well with the EeePC form factor. I like the Eeebuntu distro much more than the OOB Xandros distribution, but there are some tweaks that have to be added if you want to use some of the hardware features.

The next step was to install the eee-control tool set and set it to load on restart. The eee-control tools allow you to assign actions to the silver hotkeys, turn on and off hardware (wifi, bluetooth, webcam, SD card reader), and control the system performance mode (which is a requirement, in my mind, to take advantage of the Atom processor and get decent battery life). To add the eee-control system tray icon add an entry to the Session in the Control Center.

Once I was satisified with my install I installed the following applications:

1. Gnome Do
2. Skype
3. Songbird
4. Gnome games
5. Tomboy

I removed:

1. Banshee
2. Gnome PPP and other PPP utilities
3. gtkpod and other iPod utilities

Overall, the installation process was not unexpectedly difficult based upon prior experience with Linux (I started with Slackware and kernel 0.82 in 1993) and Ubuntu. It’s still not Windoze but I doesn’t come with all the problems that you get with Windoze.

My biggest gripe at this point is the trackpad issue. The trackpad is super sensitive and it’s very easy to inadvertantly touch it with your thumb when typeing (even more so with this form factor as the keyboard is tiny and one thumb has to be tucked under the other while typing). I tried several options that I found on the eeebuntu forums including uninstalling eee-control and installing eee-acpi-utilities, enabeling the kernel module for the elantech touchpad, and any combination of the above. I still haven’t found a solution to that issue, but I did revert back to eee-control and set one of the hotkeys to disable the touchpad. It’s a solution, but I would prefer to have  the option of disabling the touchpad while typing which is an option with the Xandros distro and workes with some of the other EeePCs that have a different trackpad.

I’ll continue to see if I can find a solution for the touchpad issue and post as soon as I do. If anyone has a solution for the 901 using Eeebuntu or easy peasy please let me know.

My first impression was that the damn thing was tiny, shiny and did I say tiny. I’ve been using it for a little over a week now and I am grabbing it from the computer room more often than sitting down at my desktop. I did take it to work with me as it fit  in my bag with my other laptop and didn’t add much weight nor was it too bulky in addition to the MacBook Pro and a few folders and notebooks. I haven’t traveled with it, but I’m sure it will make the rounds soon.

After a week of use here are my first impressions both negative and positive:

Due to it’s size, the first thing I noticed was the size of the keyboard. The reviews out there that say it is too small are valid. It took me a few days of typing on it to adjust and I’m still not near as fast as I am on a full size keyboard. The most difficult thing is symbols, capital letters, and entering in complicated passwords because the right hand shift key is tiny (as opposed to a double sized key, it shares the normal space with the up arrow and the shift is on right). I can’t say that the keyboard is a show stopper as I’m typing this blog entry on the thing and I also typed up the entry last night. I’ve also typed a dozen  e-mails and chatted with Skype and Pidgin (AIM).

The other main annoyance is the track pad is super sensitive to touching it while typing. So I’m often pecking away and the cursor is somewhere else in the text or on another window or button and I inadvertently hit the trackpad with my thumb and the focus moves or I start typing my text into somewhere else. I’m getting better at avoiding it, but I do end up hitting ctrl-z frequently to undo the last few letters I’ve typed somewhere else in this entry. I understand there is a utility that fixes this and disables the trackpad while typing and plan to look around for it, but I’ve installed Eeebuntu and I haven’t had too much luck finding a workable solution (I’ll post later on my experiences installing and using Eeebuntu and if I find a solution to this issue).

Given those main issues, I have to say that I really like the form factor. It works quite well sitting on my lap on the couch or even on my knees in bed (yeah yeah, I know….very sad (but true)). So despite the issues with it’s size, it’s what I wanted and is fitting the bill. I do have the alternative of my MacBook Pro as well as desktop machines if I need to do something that the size makes difficult.

The battery lasts for ever (some sites claim 8 hours but I think 7 is more likely). Just this morning, I surfed around on it over coffee and am sitting on the couch typing up this entry and I still have 5 hours and 50 minutes of battery (according to the power management app which has been pretty accurate to date). One of the reasons I looked at netbooks is that I saw someone using one in the airport recently. I had had my eye on the EeePCs for a while, but was still on the fence. I struck up a conversation with him and learned that on one or two night trips he didn’t even take his power supply, much less carry it in his briefcase (like I did with my current and previous laptops).

The SSD drive is nice as there is no vibration from the spinning. There is a fan, but it’s inactive most of the time and isn’t very noticeable even when running.

So those are my first impressions on the usability. I’ll post another entry later with my experiences upgrading the RAM to 2GB (why not spend $34.99), installing Eeebuntu, installing applications, file sharing with other machines and other issues dealing with hardware, compatiability, and the Eeebuntu useability.

I took a screenshot and there were the auto saves, so I didn’t lose much text. However, I did have to re-type a paragraph or two.

It’s what you get for using a beta so I’m not really complaining, I’m just warning others.

What I really wanted was alerts. I can’t tell you how many times I missed a conference call or was late to a meeting that was on my company calendar that wasn’t on my iPhone. I just wanted it to ping me 5-15 mintues before a meeting, is this too much to ask for?

The background of my situation is that I have a laptop (so not something that is always on), use Mobile Me for address book and personal calendars synchronization and I wanted to have access to my company calendar.  You would think, since I have Mobile Me running on my laptop that I would be able to see my calendar entries on my iPhone. But for some reason that I still haven’t been able to find out, that’s not the case. You would also think that since I’m running an OS X laptop (Apple), an OS X Server (Apple), Mobile Me (Apple) and an iPhone (guess who) that it would be out-of-the box functionality. There are lots of rumors that that functionality is coming in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.7), but we’re running our server on an old Quicksilver (PPC) which won’t run Snow Leopard (Snow Leopard will be Intel processors only) so there was no relief coming.

What came across is a script that creates a duplicate of your server based calendar to a local calendar. Mobile Me picks up that local calendar and keeps it in sync with my iPhone. I made several changes to include the alarms (which the initial script didn’t get). I’ve pasted the script below.

To use it:

1. copy all the text and paste it into the Script Editor (in Applications -> Apple Script).
2. Change the names of the two calendars to the name of the server calendar and a new .local or .copy entry to be your local one (the first time you run the script the local one will be created).
3. Save it as an application and run it every time you want to sync your CalDAV calendar to your local calendar.
4. Uncheck the .local or .copy calendar in iCal so you won’t see duplicate entries. One drawback which I can live with is that on my laptop I get two alarms simutaneously.
5. If you don’t like the dialog box at the end just comment the last line
   out.
6. If you wanted this to run periodically, you can create a crontab
   or run it via the scheduler, or even run it as a calendar entry itself.

If I really wanted to, I bet I could get the reverse sync working so that entries created or modified on the iPhone would sync to the CalDAV calendar, but I just haven’t wanted to go there yet. Bug me and I may work on the reverse.

(*
Script to duplicate Calendar orgCalendar into target dupCalendar
E.H. 12.9.2008
S.B. 02.20.2009 (my birthday   )
*)

property myCopies : 0
property myUpdates : 0
property myObsoletes : 0
property orgCalendar : "Server Calendar [PUT NAME OF CALENDAR HERE]"
property dupCalendar : "[PUT NAME OF TARGET CALENDAR HERE].local"
property dupEvents : {}
property myDeletes : {}

set myCopies to 0
set myUpdates to 0
set myObsoletes to 0
set dupEvents to {}

tell application "iCal"

	-- set theCalendars to every calendar
	set theCalendarNames to title of every calendar
	set theOrgCalendar to a reference to calendar orgCalendar

	if theCalendarNames contains dupCalendar then
		set theCalendar to a reference to calendar dupCalendar
	else
		set theCalendar to make new calendar with properties {title:dupCalendar}
		--set theCalendar to make new calendar with properties {title:dupCalendar, color:"{65535, 0, 0}"}
	end if

	set the eventList to uid of every event of theOrgCalendar as list
	set the eventCount to the count of the eventList

	repeat with theUId in eventList
		tell theOrgCalendar
			set theEvent to (the first event whose uid is theUId)
			-- set theProperties to the properties of theEvent as record
			set theDate to the start date of theEvent
			set theSummary to the summary of theEvent
			set theStampDate to the stamp date of theEvent
		end tell

		tell theCalendar
			try
				set theOldEvent to (the first event of theCalendar whose (start date) is theDate as date)
				set similar_found to true
			on error
				set similar_found to false
				set theEndDate to the end date of theEvent
				set theAllDay to the allday event of theEvent
				set theLocation to the location of theEvent
				-- Funny construction to work araund the fact that location may be missing a value
				try
					if theLocation is equal to "" then
					end if
				on error
					set theLocation to ""
				end try
				set theDescription to the description of theEvent
				try
					if theDescription is equal to "" then
					end if
				on error
					set theDescription to ""
				end try
				if theAllDay is true then -- work around a funny bug with all day events
					set theDate to (theDate as date) + 2 * hours
					set theEndDate to (theEndDate as date) + 2 * hours
				end if
				set newEvent to make new event at end with properties {summary:theSummary, location:theLocation, start date:theDate, end date:theEndDate, allday event:theAllDay, description:theDescription}
				-- make new event at end with properties theProperties

				-- sid's effort

				set sidCount to 1
				try
					repeat
						set theAlarm to item sidCount of sound alarm of theEvent
						set alarmTime to (trigger interval of theAlarm)
						set alarmSound to (sound name of theAlarm)
						set newAlarm to make new sound alarm at end of sound alarms of newEvent with properties {trigger interval:alarmTime, sound name:alarmSound}
						set sidCount to (sidCount + 1)
					end repeat
				end try

				-- end sid's effort

				set the end of dupEvents to (the uid of newEvent)

				set myCopies to (myCopies + 1)
			end try
		end tell

		set second_necessary to false
		if similar_found is true then
			set theOldSummary to the summary of theOldEvent
			if theSummary is not equal to theOldSummary then
				--is there a different one?
				try
					set theOldEvent1 to (the second event of theCalendar whose (start date) is theDate as date)
					set theOldSummary to the summary of theOldEvent1
					if theSummary is equal to theOldSummary then
						set theOldEvent to theOldEvent1
						set the end of dupEvents to (the uid of theOldEvent)
					else
						-- cycle repeat ?
					end if
				on error
					-- beep
					try
						set theEvent1 to (the second event of theOrgCalendar whose (start date) is theDate as date)
						set second_necessary to true
					on error
						set the end of dupEvents to (the uid of theOldEvent)
					end try
				end try
			else
				set the end of dupEvents to (the uid of theOldEvent)
			end if

			if second_necessary is true then
				set theEndDate to the end date of theEvent
				tell theCalendar
					set theOldEvent to make new event at end with properties {summary:theSummary, start date:theDate, end date:theEndDate}
					-- sid's effort

					set sidCount to 1
					try
						repeat
							set theAlarm to item sidCount of sound alarm of theEvent
							set alarmTime to (trigger interval of theAlarm)
							set alarmSound to (sound name of theAlarm)
							set newAlarm to make new sound alarm at end of sound alarms of newEvent with properties {trigger interval:alarmTime, sound name:alarmSound}
							set sidCount to (sidCount + 1)
						end repeat
					end try

					-- end sid's effort

				end tell
				set the end of dupEvents to (the uid of theOldEvent)
			end if

			set theOldStampDate to the stamp date of theOldEvent
			if theStampDate is greater than theOldStampDate then
				-- update the event
				set summary of theOldEvent to theSummary -- capitalization may have changed
				set theAllDay to the allday event of theEvent
				set allday event of theOldEvent to theAllDay
				set theEndDate to the end date of theEvent
				if theAllDay is true then -- work around a funny bug with all day events
					set theEndDate to (theEndDate as date) + 2 * hours
				end if
				set end date of theOldEvent to theEndDate
				set theDescription to the description of theEvent
				try
					if theDescription is equal to "" then
					end if
				on error
					set theDescription to ""
				end try
				set description of theOldEvent to theDescription

				-- sid's effort

				set sidCount to 1
				try
					repeat
						set theAlarm to item sidCount of sound alarm of theEvent
						set alarmTime to (trigger interval of theAlarm)
						set alarmSound to (sound name of theAlarm)
						-- add new alarm?
						try
							set oldAlarm to item sidCount of sound alarm of theOldEvent
							set oldTime to (trigger interval of oldAlarm)
							set oldAlarmSound to (sound name of oldAlarm)
							if oldTime is not equal to alarmTime then
								set trigger interval of oldAlarm to alarmTime
							end if
							if oldAlarmSound is not equal to alarmSound then
								set sound name of oldAlarm to alarmSound
							end if
							set sidCount to (sidCount + 1)
						on error
							set newAlarm to make new sound alarm at end of sound alarms of newEvent with properties {trigger interval:alarmTime, sound name:alarmSound}
							set sidCount to (sidCount + 1)
						end try
					end repeat
				on error
					--delete alarm?
					try
						repeat
							set oldAlarm to item sidCount of sound alarm of theOldEvent
							set oldTime to (trigger interval of oldAlarm)
							delete oldAlarm
							set sidCount to (sidCount + 1)
						end repeat
					end try
				end try

				-- end sid's effort

				set myUpdates to myUpdates + 1
			end if
		end if

	end repeat
end tell

-- Delete obsolete events

set myObsoletes to 0
set myDeletes to {}

tell application "iCal"
	set myUIDs to uid of events of theCalendar
end tell

repeat with myUID in myUIDs
	if dupEvents does not contain myUID then
		set the end of myDeletes to myUID
		set myObsoletes to (myObsoletes + 1)
	end if
end repeat

tell application "iCal"
	repeat with myDel in myDeletes
		delete (every event of theCalendar whose uid is myDel)
	end repeat
end tell

-- delete duplicates

set myDeletes to {}

tell application "iCal"
	set myStarts to start date of events of theCalendar
	set mySummaries to summary of events of theCalendar
	set myUIDs to uid of events of theCalendar
	set myLength to length of myUIDs
end tell

repeat with i from 1 to (myLength - 1)
	set thisStart to (item i of myStarts)
	set thisSumm to (item i of mySummaries)
	repeat with j from (i + 1) to myLength
		set thatStart to (item j of myStarts)
		set thatSumm to (item j of mySummaries)
		if thisSumm is equal to thatSumm and thisStart is equal to thatStart then
			set the end of myDeletes to (item j of myUIDs)
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat
end repeat

set n to count of myDeletes

tell application "iCal"

	repeat with myDel in myDeletes
		delete (every event of theCalendar whose uid is myDel)
	end repeat

	-- set the visible of calendar theCalendar to false

end tell

display dialog (myCopies & " records duplicated, " & myUpdates & " records updated and " & myObsoletes & " obsolete ones deleted") as text

• My cable modem works fine, why would anyone need more speed?
• What does fiber get me that DSL or Cable HSD does not?
• Just how fast is fiber?
• What can I do with fiber that I can’t do with my current broadband?
• 640K of memory should be enough for anybody.
• Should I have more fiber in my diet?

In addition to discussions around the economic development benefits of broadband, I am often looking for methods to demonstrate the difference between different technologies.  I came across a Windows application from some site in the Netherlands (it had a .nl extension) that is sort of what I’m looking for (you can dig around on the Dutch language site and eventually find an English application).

The application is very simple but effective. I would think that just about any computer science student could gen up something like this.  The only problem with the application is that it doesn’t have Cable Modem services which are quite common in the areas where I speak. Some additional features I would like to see would be the ability to customize the application and maybe enter in custom speeds, custom file sizes, or even indicate higher quality of service through a simulated data stream (like a choppy video vs. a smooth video).

Tools like these make demonstrating some of the more difficult concepts to grasp to network neophytes easier. You can almost see a light bulb go off above someone’s head when you show them the differences for something like an Xray or an engineering drawing.

If anyone knows of other offline or standalone demonstration tools, I would be very interested in seeing them and trying to integrate them into public meetings and education events.

Online tools are nice and I would be interested in seeing them as well. However, I am often speaking in locations without internet access which is why I would like offline and standalone applications.