TechImpact / it happens there first

A summation of my thoughts after 2 days hands-on with the Nokia N97.

I wanted to like this phone. First, I spent a lot of money to buy it. I could have bought a new IPhone 3G S and paid AT&T's early termination fee for what the N97 costs. Second, though I had some reservations about a few features I thought should have been part of the phone, I was a fan of my Nokia N95.

Foreshadowing complete, I can't recommend the Nokia N97 right now—to anyone.

by Jerry Gamble

I've had the unique privilege of buying 4 blue tooth headsets in the last year. Not because I wanted to experience the gamut of what the market offers, but because my wife has lost, broken or outright mangled every headset I have given her. We started out a few years back, with a cheap 20-40 dollar Motorola that came with the purchase of every phone. The phone worked great, and the headset was worth what we paid. What it did do extremely well though, was to open my wife's imagination to the potential of hands free talking to people. After a week of not having to burn the side of her face off from exposure to an over worked cell phone battery, we were ready to push the limits of bluetooth.

by Chris Gamble

After my harrowing adventure trying to buy a router, I decided to look at my free options.

We currently run CentOS as the core of our VoIP system, so I have a linux system that gets exposed to the internet -- I rationalized. So how bad would it be to pop another Ethernet card in the back and use that as a router as well. It would mean that I would never have problems with SIP over NAT again. So I went forth to purchase the card at CDW. Added the first one I found to my cart, then went to click the check out button. But the forces of the universe were against me. Just before I clicked that fated button, my laptop ran out of battery. It was destiny, fate, and didn't really happen. No, it was my own conscience that prevented me from putting a production server as a first tier internet client, even if it was Linux. No, there had to be a better solution -- and buying a complete pc to use as a firewall wasn't it.

by Chris Gamble

Every company you run across these days are cutting costs, and where I work is no different. So when we lost routers at two locations, I set to the task of replacing those routers, without sacrificing any of our CEO Bonus money. Fortunately, we work with a few larger companies that had over purchased (or recently closed) some of their branch offices. Routers were plentiful. The choice wasn't whether I could find a router to barter for, but which brand I wanted. It felt better than shopping at Wal-mart... ..

by Chris Gamble

Today's post is outside my normal commentary, as it has nothing to do with computers or technology at all. Today's post is entirely political, and while completely off our normal routing must be said, as today I am officially through with the Obama administration.

by Chris Gamble

April 2nd has come and gone, 1 day after all computers were supposed to turn on their masters to start a new world order. Most of us have survived, so the only question left is: why all the hype over these computer non-events?

by Chris Gamble

Well, this was a long weekend for me. In the same weekend that I found a killer bug in some borrowed code, I lost my router. It was a decent router, Cyber Guard sg360. Ran on a linux kernel with PPTP and IPSEC support. The ipsec we used to connect remote extensions to our asterisk phone system across the internet. Great system when it worked (voice quality is still unbelievably good).

by Chris Gamble

A recent bug tripped me up for a few hours, and so I thought it would be kind to share my embarrassing story. In my daily business, I use flash based rotators, a lot. If you ever took the time to stop by my official web site, you could see that I put a lot of value in flash as a content distribution system. So, it is a great concern, when one day I found an issue in one of my flash rotators. In the middle of rotating through a series of carefully selected images, one of them froze, in its place, dead on the screen. The tween itself never stopped, leaving me with a jumbled mess of images on top of each other peering out over the sides. PANIC!

by Chris Gamble

This week Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 RC1 (Release Candidate 1). Release candidate software is ready to be evaluated by users while it undergoes final testing, but still may contain minor issues.

by Chris Gamble

Wired news reports that one of their recent apps has run afoul of some users. MemoryUp has recently disappeared from the Google app store, but not before several users were able to experience problems ranging from corrupted memory, deleted contacts, and spam sent to several of their remaining contacts. eMobileStudio denies that their application does any harm, but the greater question is that of quality control.

by Chris Gamble