Not a single story I have read on this topic so far has pointed out that this so-called ‘messenger app’ is a skinned version of Chromium browser that does nothing more than load the same chat window you would find on Facebook’s desktop site. This should be obvious from the installer (same as Chromium) and processes the application spawns (similar …Updater.exe etc processes). There’s crap, crap, and more crap like:

The application was developed entirely by Facebook and does not constitute a new partnership with Microsoft, which is a big investor in Facebook. It’s not clear if Facebook will offer support for anything before Windows 7, or if it will simply move on towards Windows 8. Clients for Mac and Linux will likely only be released if the Windows 7 version proves popular.

If Google Chrome can be installed on Windows XP, I’m willing to bet this messenger app can be too. Man does sloppy ‘reporting’ sicken me. New York Times can be annoying in their formal and pretentious tone of referring to people as ‘Mr Zuckerberg’ and the like, but at least they bother to research up their articles before publishing rather than any bullshit that comes into the writer’s head.

***

Oh I do love the Facebook Messenger mobile app, by the way. Such an incredibly easy way to send real-time text messages without even having a contact’s phone number. The beauty is doesn’t have the urgency of SMS / WhatsApp and allows you to reply at your own pace – immediately, if online or sent as push message to mobile; at leisure, if offline or it’s a long message.

That’s so odd, isn’t it? Functionally, they are apps which are accomplishing the same thing – delivering messages in real-time – yet they have their own ‘pace’. With a smartphone, you could technically have a back-and-forth conversation using email too (if you use Gmail, it will keep the conversation threaded) but nobody in their right mind would ever use email for a chat conversation. Think about when you chat on Gmail – it actually is saved as an email conversation. There’s an implied sense of urgency when you talk to someone using an instant messenger. In this particular case, I think this happens because neither email nor Facebook Messenger give any indication of whether a message was successfully delivered to a recipient and whether it was read. WhatsApp (similarly, BlackBerry Messenger) show delivery reports as well as time of last login, thus creating implications of messages being ‘ignored’ if they are not replied to within a timeframe considered ‘reasonable’.

I wonder whether any human-computer interaction or psychological research has been done into such phenomenon, of usage patterns for means of communication depending on how they are marketed.

Long story short, I like Yahoo! a lot. Or used to. For fuck’s sake, I used Yahoo! Search as my default search engine.

The company has been an underdog, now that you think of it, ever since Google launched Gmail back in 2004 – and who doesn’t like an underdog! I always considered what its problem was more of a marketing and image problem – a problem of making things ‘cool’ with geeks again – and perhaps working a bit more on technology. When I visited Yodel Anecdotal – the Yahoo! Corporate Blog – 2-3 years ago announcements used to be about something new or the other that Yahoo! was doing. It was a company that was trying.

The latest announcement on Yodel Anecdotal today is about how they plastered a FedEx ad on one of their sites.

Video interviews with Yahoo! employees nobody gives a fuck about (except for, bless her, the employee’s extended family).

Weekly search trends – which is nothing other than filler fluff for times when they have nothing to talk about.

Plastering Puss In The Boots movie ads on Yahoo! Movies.

Ben fucking Stiller’s face filling your Yahoo! home page.

Another one about a Barnes & Nobles Nook reader ad on Yahoo! Shine.

You know what that Barnes & Noble ad announcement reads? (I’m not making any of the following excerpt up.)

The “Close X” button is displayed prominently at the top right, which brings the user back to the normal browser view. The thin Nook banner remains along the top to compliment the 300 x 250 Nook window on the right. The wallpaper then fills in with Nooks displaying different book covers.

The “Close X” button is displayed prominently at the top right, which brings the user back to the normal browser view. Are you fucking kidding me??? Is this the most exciting thing Yahoo! can muster up – across all the projects its employees were working on that week – to announce on its corporate blog?!

If yes, then I’m very worried that Yahoo! has completely lost it. Yodel Anecdotal once was a hub of showcasing what the company was innovating on, and now it is just a loud sales brochure for display advertising on sites it owns. Either that, or a sales a brochure for a multi-billion dollar buyout from investment companies who couldn’t care less whether Yahoo! is a media company or a technology company as long as financial jugglery can show profits.

I can’t help but think that all the video profiles of all and sundry employees is merely a memo handed down by HR to keep morale up among its troops so that the decent ones don’t jump ship while Yahoo! finds itself a buyer.

It’s easy to blame recently-fired CEO Carol Bartz for the mess as she couldn’t help with providing a clear technical direction. (I do think she did a half-decent job of beefing up Yahoo!’s original content news teams globally, from personal experience I’ve heard from people working in Yahoo! News teams.) Yahoo!’s attitude run deeper, tracing its roots back to the co-founders themselves who told Google to fuck off as all Yahoo! cared about was display advertising (to paraphrase wildly).

Yahoo! bought Flickr and launched many new services either through acquisitions or in-house services. Yahoo! does seem to have a reputation of a company where acquired startups go to die – think blo.gs, MyBlogLog, Jumpcut, Zimbra… Almost all in-house experiments are mothballed now, acquired services sold or shut down, and there are murmurs that casual users have started backing away from Flickr. I haven’t heard of anything new Flickr has done in a long while – at least nothing good enough to be more important than a description of how rollover ads get closed with contact details for Yahoo!’s advertising team (who are WAITING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW IN CASE YOU WANT TO PLACE AN ORDER!!! HURRY OFFER VALID ONLY TILL STOCKS LAST!!!)

I’m being harsh. Off-late, Yodel Anecdotal has once again started including product updates albeit after a year of more or fluff, fluff, and more fluff. Yet even with the course correction things aren’t the same. Most interesting news is about content deals or existing products being launched in new markets.

To this day, I use Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Mail has had an image problem among geeks ever since Gmail launched but even friends who don’t care about technology laugh these days at the notion of using a YMail address. (My saving grace is at least I have a ‘respectable’ lastname/firstname combo as my ID instead of embarrassing_name666 or something similar.) 4-5 years ago if you put Gmail and YMail’s side-by-side you could see how much richer the latter was. Tabbed UI, auto-embedding YouTube videos, image slideshows, (then later using OtherInbox, before Gmail had Priority Inbox) intelligent sorting of email – YMail got all of this long before Gmail did. When Gmail launched, it was minimalistic in features. It’s 2011 now and you know what, Gmail has gone miles and miles ahead while YMail has stagnated over the past few years.

My university and work email IDs cover all my university / work needs respectively, and Facebook (Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype…) cover everyone else I need to communicate with online. I send – maybe – 2-3 emails at most from my personal email account. Eventually I will move on from my current workplace and university, and then I will need to use a personal account – and I’m pretty sure I would use Gmail for that simply because it’s better now both on desktop and on mobile. (Yahoo! Mail for Android is fucking ugly.) The only reason why I stick with Yahoo! Mail is how much of a pain it would be to shift all my logins for other websites to my Gmail account, for now. And when a self-confessed fanboi for a company says the only reason he is sticking to their product is inertia, things are very wrong indeed.

I don’t know whether it is even possible for Yahoo! to get back in the game now. It is no longer the company I used to love as a user.

I currently own a Nokia 5630 XpressMusic. It’s a candy-bar Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition phone that’s little known outside of Europe and in a long line of Nokia phones that the company itself seems to have forgotten. When I was looking into buying a new phone, I was considering getting either this or Nokia 5530 / 5230 (Comprende Nair owns one). Back then though, Symbian Series 60 5th Edition wasn’t mature enough, and the 5630 comes with WiFi support; the 5230 didn’t have that but it had GPS support instead that the 5630 didn’t. Typical Nokia to cripple the phone in one way or another.

Over the year that I have been using this phone, I have come to realise that WiFi is next to worthless because the browser crashes whenever trying to open the menu while browsing – which is as big a bug as it gets (although a ‘recent’ update has helped with this). Technically it has a Webkit-based browser like Mobile Safari or the Android browser too but its standards support is much worse and page rendering slower. I only ever use the built-in browser when I’m downloading apps. Here’s where Nokia (until recently) annoyed by forcing you to sign in before allowing you download any map fro the Ovi Store.

I’m forced to use 3G instead of the WiFi, as the latter clearly doesn’t work for me. The downside is that the WiFi radio on most devices uses much less power (in the order of ~100mW) compared to the 3G radio that much more power-hungry (in the order of ~1.5W). Leaving WiFi scanning on all day will deplete battery perceptibly but for data transfer WiFi is far more energy-efficient than 3G. This disparity in power consumption is partly due to the fact that with 3G your cellphone often has to make contact with a base tower further away than required for WiFi. The Nokia 5630 has an 860mAh battery – woefully less for 3G browsing usage, and lasts less than five hours moderate to heavy usage. When I’m travelling and don’t have easy access to a charging station, my phone turns into a useless brick I have to carry around. (Recently, I switched off my phone’s 3G antenna and battery life has shot up dramatically as a consequence.)

So I do most of my browsing via Opera Mini. I’m addicted to browsing on the move. I check my emails and social networking accounts all the time. Pressing speed dial shortcuts as soon as I open the browser and launch five different tabs has become second nature. I like to lie down in bed before going to sleep or on waking up in the morning going through my reading list (synced via Read It Later) or the news. I find going through long form articles easier to do a small screen, for some reason. Scrolling bit-by-bit and reading for hours has a therapeutic effect on me. I feel much refreshed when I do so. (More than one roommate has commented how my phone appears to be physically glued to my hand.) No matter how good the Opera Mini experience is, it’s often just not good enough – especially when a site doesn’t have a mobile version or uses anything beyond trivial JavaScript. Formatting, apart from bold face, is stripped out too. I often resent that when I need Opera Mini to be able to handle JavaScript the most, it fails me. The poor browsing experience ends up frustrating me a lot.

I’m a heavy texter too – I prefer texting to calling – and with Twitter / Facebook / email thrown into the mix I type a lot on my phones. My previous cellphone was a touchscreen phone that required a stylus to enter text and so I’m grateful to find a physical keypad on this phone. I’m good enough with T9 to be able to type without looking at the keypad. I’d prefer a QWERTY keyboard though, only to save myself the hassle of choosing alternatives for particular key sequence.

Media playback on the phone isn’t bad at all. The music player is good as they come, and the dedicated music buttons help. At one time this was actually useful for me as I used to maintain a music collection but now I almost exclusively use Spotify for listening to music. I pay for the Spotify Unlimited account that costs £5 per month, though it doesn’t allow me to stream / store offline to mobile (that costs an additional £5 per month). I wouldn’t mind paying the extra subscription fee but if I did start using my phone as a music player in addition to my browsing device, it’s battery is going to last me even less on a single charge.

People often say that Nokia makes good camera phones – especially the ones that it fits with Carl Zeiss lenses. Nokia, at least one point of time, certainly sold the highest number of digital cameras once you start considering smartphones as digital cameras too. The Nokia 5630 comes with 3.15 megapixel camera with LED flash (and an additional front-facing VGA camera for video calls) with the ability to stitch together panorama photos too. Sounds good, doesn’t it? In my experience though, every single Nokia phone that I have seen has been plagued with poor colour reproduction when used to take pictures not in bright sunlight. Anything other lighting condition results in harsh metallic toned images. Performance in low light conditions is next to useless because of noise in pictures taken, even with the pitiful LED flash.

I’m well-aware of the technical challenges. It’s not easy to make camera sensors that small of good enough quality and expect them to perform in a range of conditions. That’s okay. But the way Nokia and many other manufacturers market is that this one device can replace your music player, your digital camera, your PDA. When it performs bad to just average, it’s disappointing because it doesn’t meet the expectations it has set. Many iPhones and Android users will tell you happily though how they don’t have to think twice about whether they need to grab a digital camera when heading out for a trip, and they’ll be quite right. Here I am as a Nokia user who has to think through whether my phone’s camera will suffice to take pictures at events I’m attending. Even goddamned Blackberry phones take better night pictures than my Nokia phone does and that was the company everyone laughed at for not being able to do multimedia well!

I’ll give an example of how deceptive Nokia’s marketing is. Around the launch of Nokia N8, they released this promotional video, ostensibly to show off the high quality video recording capabilities of the phone. (They also released another video starring Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire and Pamela Anderson.)

When you see the video, it’s a bit hard to believe a phone camera could achieve such quality. And you’ll be right too. Nokia had the balls to upload a behind-the-scenes video clearly showing that they used professional-grade cameras and sound recording equipment to shoot the ad.

If the phone itself wasn’t used to shoot the ad, then what’s the point? Nokia isn’t in the business of foosball tables after all, is it. It’s in the business of selling phones and an ad claiming it’s phone had a good camera couldn’t be shot with said phone simply because it isn’t as good as it claims!

I’m quite impressed by the quality of the camera on the iPhone 3GS / iPhone 4 especially its performance at night and in filming video. If I record a video on the 5630, I get videos with random tearing and jitter in images. Solving it is supposedly easy – “just do a hard reset of the phone” – and this is the advice you always get from Nokia and its users as if it’s expected to solve everything. Why should I be the one who has to suffer though for mistakes that Nokia has made? I was recently – a week or two ago – prompted that a stability update was available for my phone…which was released two years ago! I had specifically and manually checked for updates and yet I never received a notification for it – neither from Ovi Suite nor on the phone itself. 5630 supposedly can do firmware upgrades over-the-air, so I want to know why I forced to tether the phone for the update.

Speaking of the camera, what particularly hurts is the lack of options to be able to share pictures on the move. Network effects come into play here. The only easy upload option is to send it to Nokia Ovi Share, but I don’t want to send it to that! I want to share directly to Facebook (and enjoy all the privacy options it provides me) or directly on Yfrog (where I post my Twitter picture updates to) because that’s where all my friends whom I want to share an update are. I could upload to Facebook via email / MMS, but I don’t feel like doing that because of the many steps involved. I certainly don’t want to say that I’m too involved in documenting an event to be able to live the moment and enjoy it fully. Still, there are times when I come across something funny or where a picture can provide much better context (worth a thousand words, etc) to what I want to share. Click picture, wait to go back home to upload it, forget to, finally get around to it weeks later – that completely kills the moment.

You know where this is going. Until a couple of years ago, the feature a cellphone came bundled with made or broke the decision whether you would buy it or not. In 2011, it’s all about the app ecosystem the phone supports. It doesn’t matter whether your phone can toast bread or allow you to upload pictures on the move; it matters more whether “there’s an app for that”. I want to act all hipster and upload pictures of Starbucks coffee cups to Instagram. I want to be able to check-in to Foursquare using the app (which crashes as soon as I started it on my Symbian phone) rather than using the shitty mobile website Foursquare has.

I am not the only one complaining. Long-time Symbian evangelist blog Symbian Guru shut down last year because the editors got fed up of the random bugs, poor integration with hardware, and complete disinterest in part of developers to build apps for the platform. What they speak there is something that many Nokia users will nod in agreement to. Stephen Elop understands that the game is all about platforms and apps now, and I like his bold decision to go with Windows Phone 7 platform so as not to have Nokia end up as ‘yet another’ Android. Symbian fans just don’t get this and keep on going on and on about how it could be made better, how Meego could be a reasonable alternative, how Symbian has rock-solid power management features and back in the day, we spent hours optimising. Old-timers can rant but nobody fucking cares as long as they can play Fruit Ninja, you see. Nokia phones are built like a fucking rock, and given the state of the Ovi App Store, have the functionality of one too.

And yet. And yet…

I cannot complain that my Nokia 5630 has served me well. I have dropped it, manhandled it, gotten in wet due to rains when travelling, browsed on it when eating lunch/dinner – keypad all greasy and then wiped it off easily, put it into pockets with keys and other sharp objects that could scratch it…and every single time it has shown me the Nokia ‘Connecting People’ logo the next day. Gorilla Glass or no, it’s a level of abuse I do not expect an iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone to put up with.

Then there’s the inexorable march towards large touchscreen phones. I can’t help but think that this form factor is not necessarily the best for everyone, and the world has a lot to lose with companies such as Nokia exiting the market for other form factor smartphones (or Blackberry struggling to keep traction). Then again, my dad currently uses a Samsung Bada OS ‘smart feature-phone’ which I thought he wouldn’t like at all; turns out he does and he finds it more intuitive to use.

Am I being a spoilt brat who just wants the latest toy to play with? Or do I genuinely need to get a new phone that is a better fit for my usage pattern? I only have a few days to decide…

***

I have a thang for ‘underdog’ cellphones ever since I have owned a personal cellphone. Due to ‘circumstances’ I have barely held on to each phone for more than a year. I wanted to document my journey through the cellphones I have gone through in past few years.

To this day I’m proud of the fact that I bought my first cellphone with my own finances and not demanding my parents for one. (You see, the quizzing business is a lucrative one.) My first phone was a Nokia 3220, a cute little number – I am as embarrassed as the next guy in describing it this way, though describing it as anything else would not do justice to it nor would be truthful – that died a sad, slow death as even Nokia ignored it.

Not even an advertisement showcasing the glory of its 8-bit retro polyphonic ringtones could save the Nokia 3220

Those were the days when Nokia 7650 was the thing in the cellphone market – period – and yet I went gorilla shit over the 3220 with its synchronised flashing lights. I was an early adopter of the phone too, buying it not long after it was launched. The design and the funky lights – oh the lights – made me forgive everything about this phone that was bad: the VGA camera, the 5 MB of shared memory with no room for expansion, no Bluetooth. In the end, while the 3220 died a slow death in the market because it was caught in the awkward position of not being sober enough for adults and too cartoonish for hip youngsters, my own model of the phone died due to water-logging from sweat.

Burned by the poor multimedia experience on 3220 (memory, memory, memory) I started looking for a phone that could ‘do multimedia’ better. I did not like the bulk of the  classic iPod and the iPod Nano offerings back then hadn’t matured enough to my liking, so preferably a phone that could double up as my music player. This is when I chanced upon an ad in the newspaper for the LG KG300 ‘Dynamite’ series phone.

This promotional video bundled with every LG KG300 was pretty much the high point of the phone

On paper (literally, in that newspaper ad), LG KG300 appeared perfect for me. It had a 2 megapixel camera (that, on usage, turned out to be not bad at all), a music player that the ad claimed had ‘a graphic equalizer’, and expandable storage – perhaps not major differentiator from other phones, objectively speaking. In short, it appeared to be much better than what I had been putting up with so far. Alas, the actual phone was a far cry from the promotional material. On the surface, the Dynamite series looks good but dig deeper and you’ll find niggling user experience issues: within a Java application (Opera Mini for instance), you could not use T9 predictive text, there were parts of the interface where user prompts were in ‘Engrish‘, the video player couldn’t play Mp4 videos (as it promised) without a time-consuming conversion process that you need to find third-party software for as the bundled phone suite didn’t have that function, and (the biggest deception of all) the phone didn’t actually have a graphic equalizer – it had a couple of preset equalization for which it played back a fixed ‘graphic equalizer’ animation. The way T9 was implemented in the text message composer was particularly annoying too as it didn’t show you a list of possible options, sometimes forcing you to cycle through the whole list again in case you accidentally skipped it.

Within a year, I was bored with my LG phone and wanted to move on. I set my sights next on the Motorola ROKR E6e (E6′e’ variant was a minor upgrade that added support for EDGE). The main attraction for me was that this was a Linux phone with a vibrant community was coming up with hacks to extend its functionality. Back in the day when app stores weren’t big. custom modifications such as this were the thing. This was the first phone I owned that offered multitasking capability. ROKR E6e came bundled with a PDF and Office documents viewer, a robust email client, and handwriting recognition. Yet, the handwriting recognition was letter-by-letter, which broke the flow of writing text. More often than not I ended up using the on-screen QWERTY keyboard instead. Although technically you use the touchscreen with your fingers, the small (QWERTY) keyboard size forced you to use the bundled stylus instead. The browser – Opera Mobile – was actually quite good. The camera however didn’t work as well; the problem with it was that it took a picture as soon as shutter button was depressed. On a phone doing this causes your hand to shake, thus resulting in blurry images. Many people who had this phone complained but nobody seems to have listened. There were other niggles such as the screen used to take a noticeable time to refresh the screen when scrolling, causing a jittery scrolling display.

Motorola’s advertising in India pushed the music features of ROKR E6

Still, as far as phones went this cheap model offered features many higher end smartphones in the day offered. Certainly it put up with more abuse than other phones would have been able to handle; try dropping an iPhone down a couple of flights of stairs and tell me whether it survives intact. My ROKR E6 became useless for me though when the hardware lock for the touchscreen broke. Yes, there was a ‘soft’ touchscreen lock too, but the same screen also put a dial pad and a switch off button that caused random phone calls to friends or sudden shutdowns when I carried it in my pocket. I was in the UK when this happened and as the phone was never launched there, I was informed by Motorola that the only way to repair it would be submit it for repairs and wait while they shipped the phone to China and back for repair. I would have to wait for two months to get my repaired phone back! I could not live without one for so long, and I started looking for a new phone.

That’s when I decided to buy my current Nokia 5630. There was drama associated as usual with this purchase too, as Royal Mail lost the first shipment of the phone that I ordered online. I had to wait over a month for the package to be officially lost as declared before I got a refund and ordered a second time online.

You’ve read the rest of the story above.

There’s one good reason commenting on a blog hosted on Blogger.com makes me mad: despite being linked to a Google account, it’s the one Google service that doesn’t automatically log you in. With blogs, this means once you’ve entered a comment, you’re redirected to a login page and then redirected back to comment page

Wait, I didn’t get the option to subscribe to follow-up comments via email! Now that I have had to re-login, I see the option for that. So…leave another comment just to enable email updates? And the comment field cannot be empty? I’ll probably have to delete the second comment because it will probably be worthless? Fuck you very much, Blogger. FUCK YOU!

I abandoned Blogger.com’s blog hosting service long ago to get full creative control over my blog. Blogger’s service is not bad per se as much as it is utterly neglected. For the purpose of making press releases and pretending to still being the cool kids on the blog block, they put together a half-decent effort in Blogger In Draft. What isn’t so cool is that Google takes months / years to push these improvements out of perpetual beta testing. The majority of Blogger users don’t know, don’t care, or can’t be bothered with the hassle of shifting to another blogging platform even when they feel features are lacking. Even though the features have been developed as ‘Blogger In Draft’, they simply aren’t pushed out for greater public use!

Don’t get me started about the schizophrenic look Blogger blogs are forced to adopt because of the platform. Why should I be taken to a separate site altogether to post comments (as it sometimes does)? I know that’s an option offered to the user but why the fuck would you even offer it to your users if you care about a pleasant user experience! Why does clicking on an ‘About Me’ link take me to another, differently-styled site altogether? Honestly, WTF is the point of ‘Google Friend Connect’? Yay, I clicked a button. Now what? Where’s the beef?

Blogger.com templates are the metaphorical equivalent of Ronald Weasley wearing dress robes from the last century. Giving users the choice to change colours and set background images sends everyone back to the Geocities-era. This is not ‘customisation’! I am fed up of the same old two-column, here’s-a-set-of-links-in-sidebar design when I visit Blogger.com hosted blogs. The problem isn’t that it’s ‘plain’, but the platform itself limits what you can do. I have never come across a single Blogger.com blog whose design has delighted me when reading text on it. Add to that the verbal diarrhoea – and the users are blame for this – of chat boxes, buttons, ‘visitor maps’, virtual pets, ‘award showcases’ and whatnot.

(Even worse-off are those who still don’t know / care about shifting away from LiveJournal, who have to deal with a seriously antiquated system. On second thoughts, perhaps I don’t want all those spinning GIFs of Edward Cullen or whatever-the-fuck-the-name-of-Wolf-Boy-is to run over WordPress.com.)

Then there are bugs such as the one I mentioned that have been around for ages, yet there’s no way to file bug reports with Google. Sure, they probably have a ‘contact us’ form somewhere that is only revealed after browsing through ten pages in Blogger help and many patronising Are you sure you haven’t seen this help FAQ… screens. Going by my experience with Google customer support, they probably print out all those contact form submissions from they shiny Chromebooks using Google Cloud Print and use it to wipe their ass. Who gives a shit about user experience?

If Google really is dog-fooding the Blogger service (as it often brags about it does with other projects its developing), then how can they not notice the that are frustrating about the user experience for years now? How can they not see – even if they continue to have millions of users – that their community is decaying?

(See what I meant by being cynical of my own cynicism? I’m not making this up! I am genuinely that conflicted internally of what I feel about my own beliefs.)

Deep breaths, Banerjee, deep breaths. Calm down. Reach your Zen state. And tidy up your fucking desk.

So, for a break from Sticking It To The Man, I decided to help out The Man instead by writing a guide on cellphone companies and Whatever Else The Title Promised You. This is first in a series of informational posts that I intend to write, which I hope will be useful for transitory residents of the island nation of Singapore – tourists, exchange students, foreign students, expats, illegal immigrants, and pirates.

I don’t promise anything interesting for my regular readers – except for a shocking statistic in the section on mobile data prices and a lone joke about a web telephony service that leverages on a racist Spanish stereotype.

***

The Basics

Singapore’s telecom sector is an oligopoly with three operators: SingTel (government-backed, 46% market share), StarHub, and M1. All three operate a GSM-based network with support for 3G handsets. The only serious implication on this for most visitors to Singapore is that if the current cellphone you own operates on a CDMA-network – as is the case with a few (albeit large) American networks – you will be unable to use it in Singapore. Most modern GSM-handsets come with dual-band / tri-band / quad-band support so they should work in Singapore. Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa generally use the same frequency bands; the odd-one-out is America again, so if you’re visiting from the US then you need to double-check whether your handset will work.

Protip: In Singapore, the term ‘handphone’ is most commonly used. People will understand though if you use equivalent terms like cellphone or mobile phones; it’s usually visitors who get confused when ‘handphone’ is used.

The easiest way to get connected is to get a prepaid (or ‘pay-as-you-go’, if you prefer) SIM card. You can buy one from any operator-run outlets, convenience stores (7-Eleven, Cheers, Fairprice…) as long as you have your passport with you. The details page of your passport will be photocopied / scanned for registration purposes. The only advantage of buying at an operator’s own outlet is that you can choose the phone number that you get – and if you have a fetish for specific numbers then you might just turn out to be a lucky bastard. There is no waiting period for SIM card activation.

(India, as always, has insanely strict rules for issuing prepaid SIM cards – forms need to be filled, passport photo and proof of residence is required, there’s a waiting period of 2-3 days. Think about how hard it must be for tourists! I’d be extremely annoyed if I came across equally strict laws in any of the countries I’ve travelled to. )

A new SIM usually costs S$15-20, with S$5-10 calling balance included. In such a competitive market, there’s isn’t much price differentiation among the three operators for basic services such as voice and text, so it doesn’t make much different which operator you choose if all you want are the basics. Typical local call rates range from 8-22 cents / minute for voice calls (depending on time of day) and 5 cents / text (local) or 15 cents / text (international), so calling / texting is fairly cheap for light usage. Take note, however, that in Singapore you are charged for incoming voice calls too at the outgoing local voice call rate; this comes as a shock to visitors from countries where it’s not standard practice to do so. If you expect to receive a lot of incoming calls, you can get the incoming call charge waived by paying a daily charge of 60 cents instead; the procedure for this differs from operator-to-operator but should be included in the start guide included with your SIM. Another thing you should be prepared for is that customer care hotlines are not operated 24/7 and often there are call charges applied to speak to customer care (albeit a reduced price).

Recharge vouchers can be bought at any convenience store or operator outlet. You also have the option of paying for a recharge online via credit card. Although in theory you can buy low-value ‘top-ups’ of S$5 too, I have rarely found these on sale. Top-up vouchers of denominations S$10 and above are available widely. If you are a heavy user, watch out for promotional top-ups: all three operators have specific recharge denominations, say, S$30 for which they give ‘S$130 value’. The way this works is that the top-up denomination – S$30 in this example – is added to your ‘main’ calling balance, and deducted when you make international calls or access data; an additional S$100 is added as ‘special’ calling balance, and deducted for all incoming voice calls and all local outgoing calls. The catch is that the ‘special’ calling balance is time-limited – usually 30 days – and then expires, but your ‘main’ calling balance never affected by time restrictions.

Yes, it is as terribly complicated as it sounds. You need to evaluate your usage and see whether you can make by with ‘standard’ recharges or need ‘promotional’ recharges. More information on individual price plans can be found on the following web pages:

• SingTel ‘hi!Card‘ (This is the only prepaid SIM card that comes in separate 2G and 3G variants. If you want to access data over a 3G network, choose the right SIM. The variants cost the same as far as I know.)
• StarHub ‘Green’
• M1 ‘M Card’

***

Mobile Data Usage

While standard usage (voice + text) is fairly cheap in Singapore, smartphone users need to prepare themselves for bill shock. Standard pay-as-you-go data transfer charge is 1 cent / kB but this is usually charged in blocks of 10 kB, so you end up paying 10 cents for even the ‘lightest’ web page you load. There is no distinction between 2G and 3G data transfer – both cost the same. If your phone is a BlackBerry, you cannot use the standard pay-as-you-go data plans – you need to get a BlackBerry-specific add-on service. Also, all three operators offer ‘prepaid data SIM cards’ with seemingly better rates but be careful of these as they are exclusively for data usage, i.e., you cannot make phone calls or receive texts on them; the data SIM cards are primarily intended for PDAs / netbooks / tablets that accommodate SIM cards.

All three operators, however, run periodic promotions where the charge is reduced to 0.2-0.5 cents / kB. Still, data on prepaid mobile phone plans is expensive in Singapore. To take an example of a fairly common smartphone app like Google Maps, initial load results in a transfer of ~100 kB of data, which works out to 20-100 cents. As you continue using the app, the amount of data transferred continues to pile up resulting in a deduction of anywhere between S$1 to S$5 for using an app once or a standard browsing session!

Some rough estimates for amount of data transferred for typical usage:

1. Browsing 10 pages via Opera Mini: ~500 kB (Using Opera Mini browser instead of your phone’s native browser is a good idea, as it compresses data from the site you want to access before sending it to your phone, thereby reducing the amount of data transferred.)
2. Using Google Maps: ~1-3 MB (~1000-3000 kB)
3. Skype call over 3G: ~600 kB / minute (I believe Skype uses a variable data transfer rate, so your mileage may vary.)
4. Watching a clip on YouTube: 1 MB / 2 minutes (This is, I think, for the lowest quality version – which is the only version the YouTube app on my smartphone supports. ‘Smarter’ phones like iPhones / Androids may guzzle more.)

Fortunately, there is some relief at hand. Here’s a list of special plans that the operators offer:

• SingTel
  • Prepaid data plans: S$1 / 10 MB / 7 days or S$7 / 1 GB / 7 days. If you’re data usage is very light, mostly restricted to emails then the first plan should be enough for you as it is just an additional S$4 / month. However, if you are a regular / heavy data you might have to choose the second plan, and then if becomes quite expensive as it’s S$28 in addition to whatever however much you recharge your main balance.
  • 0.facebook.com (that’s a zero, not an ‘o’): 0.facebook.com is a ‘light’ version of the Facebook mobile website, text-only. Only for SingTel subscribers in Singapore, if you visit the ‘zero’ mobile version, then you don’t have to pay anything for data transfer. Quite handy if you’re a heavy Facebook user.
• StarHub
  • Prepaid data plans: S$2 / 30 MB / 3 days, S$4 / 200 MB / 3 days, S$7 / 1 GB / 7 days. Slightly varied pricing, but the structure is the same.
  • Although I cannot find a reference to it anywhere on the StarHub website, I remember chancing upon advertisements for a StarHub prepaid card that comes with 50 MB / month of data included on a specific monthly top-up. It might bear fruit to ask about this at a StarHub retail outlet, for low-usage customers.
• M1
  • I used to be an M1 prepaid subscriber earlier, and as far as I know, M1 does not offer any data plans to its prepaid customers. There are bolt-on packs listed here, but apparently they are only for postpaid users – or so I was told by M1 customer care.

I am a heavy mobile data user. My current (postpaid) plan comes bundled with free 12 GB of data transfer per month, out of which I use around 1 GB per month. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how much it would have cost me if was paying pay-as-you-go rates – more than S$2000!

I constantly access a bevy of websites – my email, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter – which adds up over time. (In fact, I prefer to read long text articles on my phone, somehow I can concentrate better reading through a smaller ‘viewport’ than my laptop.) I do, however, use Opera Mini to reduce data transferred. I’m also very navigationally-challenged and resort to Google Maps for directions, and I usually have to keep it running to give me real-time update on my location when trying to get to a new place. I also occasionally use Skype over 3G or browse YouTube via its app. I’d love to listen to online radio on my cellphone too, if only it could last more than a five hours of usage with heavy data usage.

Free Nationwide WiFi

There is one way you can minimise mobile data costs if your phone / device has WiFi support: Wireless@SG (pronounced ‘wireless at SG’). Sponsored by the Singapore government, Wireless@SG offers free WiFi to all residents and tourists at public places throughout the island. You do need to register for the service, and for this you will need to fill out a form the first time you connect to Wireless@SG hotspot. Once you’ve created an account, you can use the login details to sign on to any Wireless@SG location. Watch out for ‘Wireless@SGx‘ connections, as these are usually faster (apart from being more secure). As you can imagine, speeds vary wildly depending on how many people are connected at any given location so browsing during peak times can feel slow; still, the utility of free nationwide WiFi cannot be denied!

Having said that, I cannot my say experience with Wireless@SG has been without frustration. The actual network operation has been assigned to three operators – SingTel, M1, and iCell Wireless. Depending on the location you are at, you will see a network / login page by a different operator – though you can still sign on with an account from any operator. The first time I created an account, I got an icellwirless.net ID which FOR THE LOVE OF MY LIFE I COULD NEVER GET TO CHANGE MY PASSWORD ON. Yeah, it was that annoying when you have a randomly assigned initial password. To make matters worse, it often failed to authenticate when trying to logon. I finally got fed up and signed up for a new Wireless@SG account, this time with / from a SingTel-operated location. From experiences I’ve heard, the SingTel and M1 operated locations / services are on average are better than iCell’s. Leaving aside password reset issues, I have often found randomly unable to sign on to a network – and the culprit usually is iCell.

Note that browsing data over WiFi instead of 3G depletes your phone battery faster. You will also not be able to use the connection on the move. Also, as an additional note of caution, sometimes you may see a network titled ‘Free Public WiFi’ show up in your list of networks to connect to. I don’t know what this is or why this network exists in so many areas in Singapore, but this is NOT Wireless@SG and your device will never successfully connect. Knowing this should save you hours of frustration.

***

Phone Contracts

If you are a heavy voice + text user, you might find ‘special’ recharges enough to last your usage, without having to pay a minimum fixed amount. If you are a heavy data user, however, and planning to stay in Singapore for a while then you should consider getting a postpaid phone contract. Phone contracts come both with or without a handset included – if you already have a phone, then you could opt for a SIM-only contract. Handset contracts – with free or otherwise cellphone included – run for two-year durations (this is a fixed rule). For SIM-only, there are options for monthly contracts that can be discontinued any time you want without a termination penalty as well as fixed duration contracts of 12-24 month duration. The difference between fixed-length and flexible contracts is usually in the ‘extras’. SingTel, for instance, on its student/youth plans offers a free subscription to its unlimited music download service. Similar perks exist for standard plans too.

There are caveats to getting a contract though:

• You can apply for a contract only if your foreign pass (student / temporary worker / work) is valid for more than six months. Yeah, so most exchange students who come for a semester (four months) don’t have recourse to this option and you’ll just have to suck it up with prepaid data plans.
• No roaming or international calling if your foreign ID is a Student Pass. Don’t bother going shop-to-shop, because ALL three operators have this policy. You’re actually worse off than when you were using prepaid, who get both these services. Roaming isn’t a big deal though, as in most neighbouring countries you travel to you can pick up local prepaid cards for the duration of your stay – a lot cheaper even for short stays as roaming rates are very expensive (S$1/min for calls!). International calling is dealt with in a separate section, read on. It seems Singaporean operators don’t trust students to keep a tab on their bill – for good reason. I know friends who ran up bills of S$100-200 in a month.
• Deposit of around S$300 when signing contract. The good news is that deposit is refundable. The bad news is that it’s still not particularly cheap, so getting a contract

Calling / text rates are same as prepaid, though you shouldn’t have to pay if you choose your price plan carefully the amount of minutes you need. Most of the operators throw in generous data plans of up to 12 GB of data transfer per month, the only reason why I’m not hit by a 2000-dollar fee every month! Depending on which country you’re coming from, you might be surprised to find that you have to pay extra for ‘features’ such as caller ID. (I personally don’t it’s worth it to skimp on caller ID, it’s way too crucial on a cellphone.) Usually though the companies waive off bolt-on fees for the initial few months.

Once again, the offerings of SingTel, StarHub, and M1 are very much similar for postpaid plans. If I may be so biased, I would suggest my current provider – SingTel. As the market leader, it is a sponsor for many events in Singapore such as Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix, Singapore Beer Festival, music concerts, New Year parties at Sentosa, et al – and you’ll often find some perk or the other at every venue / event from SingTel. It also has a comprehensive rewards programme which allows you to earn points for usage over time, and trade it in for bill reductions, new phones, discounts / vouchers at a wide range of retail partners. You get even sweeter deals with SingTel if you’re a student with free music downloads and free tickets for events.

Number Portability

Retaining your exist number is possible if you switch mobile operators but only if you’re shifting from postpaid to another postpaid provider, or from one prepaid to another. (You might need to confirm this for prepaid, I’m fairly sure it’s allowed. Anyway, my point is that you cannot port a prepaid number to a postpaid plan or vice versa, even within the same mobile operator. Sucks, yah.) You need to call up your existing provider to consult the exact procedure they have. Generally, however, the porting is done within two business days. With offerings so similar, there is hardly any incentive to switch!

***

International Calling

Dialling direct to a foreign destination (by adding country code) is a bad idea in Singapore – it’s just too expensive! The cellphone operators are quite smart though, and offer their own Voice over IP (VoIP) services. You don’t need to be at a computer, it works from your normal cellphone. The way they offer cheaper rates is that the carry that voice data to destination country over the Internet, so you only pay for last mile connectivity over cellphone at your and their end. Long story short, you get cheap calls – as low as 20-30 cents per minute. They call these services ‘IDD’ (International Direct Dialling, although strictly speaking it isn’t) and offer two options: a ‘basic’ service with (supposedly) lower quality, based on VoIP; and a ‘premium’ service with (supposedly) higher quality, based on normal phone networks.

The basic, VoIP-based international calling service is offered to select 18-20 countries which shouldn’t be an issue for most users (given the demographics of visitors to Singapore) as all major European, Asian countries as well as USA are covered under this list. To make an international call with the ‘basic’ dialling service, you dial prefix number + country code + destination number, where ‘prefix’ is an operator-specific prefix that you add. Here’s a list, with links to the operator’s website for further information on rates and usage:

• SingTel: 019
• Starhub: 018
• M1: 021

For prepaid subscribers – if you have a ‘special’ balance arising out of a ‘special’ top-up (see previous information on this) – then the balance will be deducted from your ‘special’ balance, thus leaving your main balance intact. This is really useful if you make a large volume of international calls as the special top-ups give S$100 or above to be used in a month. Postpaid users – if you have international calling facility, as I mentioned, student pass holders don’t – have these calls count towards their local usage or have these charges shown separately.

I regularly used M1′s ‘basic’ IDD service when I was a prepaid customer with them. Never once during a conversation did I feel any lag, noise, or any disturbance that hindered the flow of the call. To me, the ‘premium’ service just seems like a ploy by The Man to con gullible people into buying superior service where no advantage exists; my sympathies if you’re forced to used it because your VoIP calls to your country are not supported.

VoIP for International Calling

Foreign/exchange students on a postpaid students – or people otherwise without international calling facility – will have to figure out alternatives, as we are not allowed to use even the basic IDD service. Most buy ‘calling cards’, which I find stupid as you end up paying twice – once to the local phone number you need to dial for the card, and then the amount deducted from calling card value. My suggestion would be to not go for this option.

Jajah

Jajah.com is the VoIP service that I currently use to make international calls. Unlike most other services that require you to install software on your computer / phone and require that the destination party also has the same, Jajah works directly from phones. The concept is simple: set your current phone number on Jajah, enter the phone number you want to call on the Jajah website / app / mobile site, and Jajah then rings your phone as well as the destination party. (Behind the scenes, Jajah transfer voice data over Internet and you only pay for the last-mile termination on phone networks.) All you need is to pick up and talk! Obviously, this frees you from being tied down to your desk when talking, and doesn’t require large data transfers over mobile.

Jajah’s calling rates are cheap yet still relatively higher than a majority of VoIP calling services. I find the 1-2 cent premium worth it as long as I don’t have to rely on a spotty internet connection. Voice call quality is usually good with slight lags at times, although if you’re trying to call a number that requires you to key in numbers (customer helplines, for instance) I sometimes find that Jajah is unable to send the DTMF tones required to register your input. Redialling the number might help. Also, Jajah starts billing you the moment you pick up your phone and wait for the other party’s phone to ring – so merely dialling a number and picking up Jajah’s callback incurs a (small) charge. Which is standard, if you think about it.

Texting om Jajah is a big hit-or-miss. Sometimes it delivers texts, sometimes doesn’t. Singapore’s operators offer low text rates themselves so this is a non-issue. Conference calls and scheduled calls can also be set up via the Jajah website, as well as local number aliases for your contacts that you can call directly from your phone. Actually, Jajah offers many different mediums to initiate a call. It also has opt-in pre-call advertising supposedly pays you for listening to a commercial before your connection is completed but the payout are very small.

I’m fairly happy with Jajah’s call products; what I’m not as happy is with their customer support. Their support forum seems practically abandoned since 2009 / 2010, with spam posts going unchecked. The other option is to email customer support – which I have done thrice so far without ever getting a reply from their ‘dedicated support engineers’: first, to change the billing currency of my account from British pounds to Singapore dollars; second, to ask why DTMF tones don’t work sometimes on calls; third, to complain about isolated incidents when I my phone rang but the called party’s didn’t despite the call ‘connecting’ according to Jajah. The FAQs / how-to’s cover basic queries, though. Despite a seeming lack on interest demonstrated by poor customer support, none of my issues have been show-stoppers and it seems that they are working on new products.

(Jajah was bought out by Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica. Now that it’s owned by a Spanish company – and you know how Spaniards pronounce ‘j’ as ‘h’ [roughly] – I expect Telefonica executives refer to that division as ‘Hahah’. Must be the laughing-stock of the whole company; the nerds who get ribbed by the jocks at company events.)

Skype

Wait, don’t leave yet! Yes, I know everyone knows about Skype but only for freebie calls. It doesn’t have to be that way! Pay-as-you-go rates for calling phones from Skype are 3-15 cents / minute, with cheap subscription rates for specific countries available too. In addition to this, I also bought a SkypeIn number with a London area code – $15 for 3 months – which I use in conjunction with call forwarding in Skype that allows my UK friends to call me easily, even if I’m not online. Whenever anyone calls – either by dialling my UK number or from within the Skype software – I get the call transferred to my phone and chat with them on it.

For some reason, my netbook (a Lenovo S10-3c) internal microphone does not work with Ubuntu despite trying out the workarounds mentioned in this bug report. Thus, I am unable to use Skype on Linux for voice chats, forcing me to reboot into Windows every time I want to have a long conversation that I want to conduct free through Skype. Which is very annoying.

Off late, Skype on Windows has been particularly bothersome too as it doesn’t log me in – not straight away. The first time I launch Skype after a fresh boot, it just gets stuck on the login screen and then stops responding. I need to kill the process, and then launch Skype again – and then it logs in straight away. I have no idea why this has to be so but it has become a ritual for me now as the only way to get Skype working on my PC.

Thus I grew to prefer to talk on my cellphone rather than being tied down to my computer. Using Skype on my mobile is a hit / miss. Thankfully, my post-paid data plan means I don’t need to worry about data usage. You can always Skype over WiFi of course. Get Skype for your phone here. I have a Nokia 5630 XpressMusic S60 phone that isn’t officially supported, and yet the Symbian app works fine. What’s annoying is that Skype doesn’t allow you to download the mobile app to your desktop, and when accessing from your phone browser blocks any downloads from ‘unsupported’ phones. I got the .sis installer from a friend who had a Nokia N95; a quick search throws up multiple results for Symbian installers for Skype – try them! iPhone / Android users should find the app install task fairly hassle-free.

Even though I get a ‘full-strength’ 3/3.5G signal in my hostel, I can still never seem to use Skype over 3G unless I walk to this very specific spot outside a cafeteria near by hostel block; otherwise, the call is too distorted / unstable. I study electronic engineering and it beats me why this happens with practically the same signal strength! Maybe this is an isolated issue with SingTel.

Bonus tip: Sure, Google Talk Voice Chat offers voice / video calling for free between Gmail users. What you may not know is that if you change you country to ‘USA’ in your profile, then you can even call landlines or cellphones in the US for free!

***

Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s going to read all this. Oh well. This is way too long to copyedit and I don’t have time, so if you come across any errors – copy or factual – do point them out!

I run a forum using Vanilla Forum at gyaan.in – regular readers of this blog would know about it. A couple of months ago, I upgraded the forum to the new, redesigned Vanilla Forum 2.x version that comes with built-in support for registration verification using reCAPTCHA. Until the 1.x branch, out-of-the-box there was no way to pre-approve registrations; a moderator had to approve each account manually. (This is what gyaan.in used too.) With a function as crucial as user registration I didn’t want to make modifications only to have to re-modify and test it every time I had to apply an upgrade patch. So when version 2.x came along with baked support for reCAPTCHA, I was happy to jump on-board and remove the approval process. (A move that I must admit was controversial within the gyaan.in community and the moderators.)

Over the past few weeks, I noticed that gyaan.in’s email inbox was filling up with a considerable number of mail delivery failure notifications for the initial email sent right after successful registration. I didn’t give much thought to it as I (incorrectly) believed the first step in the new Vanilla Forum sign up process was a verification email. It turns out that it is not – the system sends an email only once the user has been authenticated. Had I known this, the number of mailer daemon messages should have set alarm bells off already.

Today, one of the members (Shreyans) casually mentioned in a private message to me (in which he was discussing other technical issues that he was facing with the forum) that there seemed to be a lot of users on the board with the board with ‘nude’ or ‘naked’ in the username. To my surprise, I discovered that was indeed the case – and in many instances these user accounts had the same email address too. These were obviously spammer accounts, so I deleted them immediately. But that got me thinking how they could have gotten through.

reCAPTCHA (now owned by Google) throws CAPTCHA challenges from a corpus of OCR-recognised words from Google’s text digitisation efforts. You might have seen this verification challenge on Facebook too some time. Two words are shown and you are told to enter both correctly to pass.

Sometimes, reCAPTCHA flips you off by throwing two-dimensional arrays into the challenge

Behind the scenes, reCAPTCHA doesn’t know what both the words are. One of the words has been positively identified by OCR and is kept as a ‘control’ word. The second word is not recognised by OCR; user input for that word is taken and stored into a database. Once enough users identify an ‘unknown’ word as the same word, the reCAPTCHA system uses that result for sending back the corrected word to text digitisation programmes and adds it to the corpus of control words used in the system.

A well-known loophole is that it is possible to enter one word incorrectly and have reCAPTCHA consider the answer valid. What I couldn’t understand is how spambots could get past the control word. So I started playing around with the text I entered as reCAPTCHA response in Vanilla Forum’s registration page. I found that…

• if the number of characters entered for each word is correct;
• and, the words are entered as correctly as possible, except for one character (i.e., one character out of an entered word was deliberately incorrect)

…then reCAPTCHA would authenticate the entry as correct! This issue is not isolated to the Vanilla Forum implementation of reCAPTCHA either, as you can achieve similar results using the demo form on the official reCAPTCHA website.

I searched around for possible reasons for this and found this entry in the reCAPTCHA wiki:

On the verification word, reCAPTCHA intentionally allows an “off by one” error depending on how much we trust the user giving the solution. This increases the user experience without impacting security. reCAPTCHA engineers monitor this functionality for abuse.

It seems this is a problem-by-design. What seems to be crucial in equation seems to be the implication that this off-by-one error is allowed “depending on how much we trust the user giving the solution”. How exactly is this trust defined? I don’t think IP address blocking can be used (can it?), because the request for verifying inputs is sent by the server using reCAPTCHA tied to the specific public-private key pair of the site. Which means ‘block IP addresses that send large volumes of incorrect inputs’ cannot be used to define this ‘trust’, as the IP address would be of server rather than the spambot / client.

Another possible yardstick for measuring ‘trust’ would be allowing one-off errors for typographically similar characters: ‘i’ / ‘l’, ‘a’ / ‘d’, ‘r’ / ‘n’, etc. However, I don’t think their system uses this either as in all my attempts, it accepted one-off errors for entirely different-looking characters, such as ‘s’ / ‘w’, ‘q’ / ‘f’, etc.

reCAPTCHA is undoubtedly the most popular CAPTCHA implementation used on the Web these days, which makes this such a serious issue. A lot of forums and sites now use this de-facto because it’s a small way to pitch into the noble ideal of text digitisation, and also because presenting ‘real’ words appears to be a more elegant solution than randomly generated text.

Unfortunately, from what I have found through experience now the checks and balances used by reCAPTCHA are simply not good enough and seem to be leaking through at least 10 spambots daily. And this just on a relatively low-traffic website like gyaan.in. Imagine the implications on a much juicier target like Facebook or the countless StackExchange websites, which all use it for human verification.

For now, I am going back to trusting manual moderator approval on my Vanilla Forum site. It seems when it comes to identifying humans, nobody is better at that job than a human.

I have lived through a fair number of Year of the Linux Desktops, and consequently had the pleasure of using tolerating OpenOffice.org for years. In the light of recent news of the German Foreign Office migrating back to Windows XP from Linux, I thought of writing about one aspect this ‘interoperability’ that the German FO is crying about.

I never felt OpenOffice.org to be lacking in any respect compared to Microsoft Office 2003 when I was in high school (back in the day, Office 2007 wasn’t out yet). OOo satisfied my requirements without costing me a dime. In hindsight, that was only because on most occasions I was printing out hard copies of documents for submission, and didn’t often have to bother about whether a document that was displaying as I wanted on my PC would display the same way on another.

Now, in university, interoperability is a major headache for me. And yes, by ‘interoperability’ I mean the very narrow of definition of ‘whether document files work with Microsoft Office’. When working on project reports or some such, I often have to work on documents that have images, charts, tables formulas et al, i.e., fairly ‘complex’ formatting in as to how any element on the page is placed. More often than I like it, I find the formatting screwed up. Even for something as simple as taking a document to the library for printing, it has become second nature for me to export my ODF documents to PDF so that I have ‘assured’ formatting on library (Windows) machines.

Let me illustrate my points with a few examples. I am the studio director at the student TV station in my (exchange) university and I need to edit studio scripts every week that is sent to me by the production assistant, edited on her Office 2010 install. This is how it looks when opened in Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition on my netbook.

n.b. I cannot turn of Track Changes display in Office 2010 Starter Edition

When I open the same file in OpenOffice.org 3.3.0, out of that 15 page document only TWO pages are displayed. I am not kidding. It actually shows up as ‘Page 1 / 2′. I can understand this is an Office 2007/2010 .docx format document and support for this “isn’t as good yet“, but jeez, showing 2 pages out of 15 is a major screw-up, isn’t it! Let’s see what out of the pages it can read does OOo show.

This is with Track Changes turned off in OOo

On surface, it seems that OOo got most of the page displayed correctly, but a closer look will reveal page elements that are completely missing. The ‘SOVT’ icon is gone, so is the box with ‘S/I’, as well as adornments such as boxes around ‘ZOOM 5sec’. If I had to solely rely on OOo for my document needs, I wouldn’t have known these elements are missing. For me, this is a major problem as those are crucial directives that I need when directing the studio shoot.

Even if I concede that this problem may be because OpenXML file support isn’t as ‘complete’ yet in OOo, that doesn’t explain why it utterly messes up page display with older .doc files, like this example below.

With track changes turned off in OOo

Content from two consecutive pages was stacked on top of each other on one page along with previous edits even though show changes was turned off, rendering this file useless. Note that this file was created in Office 2007 and exported as .doc.

Okay, so maybe the whole problem is with Office 2007/2010 creating corrupted files which it itself can figure out, but not other software. Maybe the files that I was trying to open was ‘too complex’ (debatable). How about a simple document – a table with two columns with text in rows – created in a word processor not developed by Microsoft – say, Mac OS X’s bundled TextEdit – and exported as a .doc file. Like this file below.

This TextEdit-created file displays correctly in Microsoft Office 2007/2010 too. And here’s how the same file displays in OpenOffice 3.3.0.

It isn’t as if these are two isolated incidents where OpenOffice.org has failed me in being passably reliable, even for freeware software. I have lost track of the number of times when my documents/presentations have been messed up by OOo. Sometimes, opening a .docx file created and saved using OpenOffice.org fails to render correctly on the same system with the same install of OOo. Figure that. And while Microsoft may have a conflict of interest, Doug Mahugh makes a seemingly well-reasoned argument how certain aspects of ODF file rendering is broken among variants of OOo itself like IBM’s Lotus Symphony.

Throughout this blog post, I have mentioned OpenOffice.org as the errant document suite, but the new Document Foundation’s ‘LibreOffice’ fork isn’t any better. A few weeks ago, I was working on a presentation that I needed to send for a job interview. I created it in OpenOffice 3.3.0 one day (saved as ODP) and picked up work the next day on a new install of LibreOffice 3.3.1. (The Document Foundation advises users to remove OOo before doing a LibreOffice install.) I saved a PPT and a PDF version of the file in addition to the native ODP file (my usual routine) after I was finished. I opened the file Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 Viewer to check before sending it off, and got an error message telling me that the file was corrupted. Perplexed, I tried opening the file again in LibreOffice only to find that LibreOffice couldn’t open it. What’s more, when I tried to open the ODP file for the same, LibreOffice couldn’t read that either! The only way I got out of this pickle was because I had an old version of the ODP file saved in my Dropbox account. (Thanks, Dropbox, for maintaining copies of deleted files forever!)

A quick browse through the bug tracker for both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice shows a sizeable number of bugs that affect a (significant?) subset of users with document display. In most cases it seems there’s a problem with a particular file or that it cannot be consistently reproduced across a number of systems. But it’s precisely this uncertainty that I dislike – and I think I speak for a lot of OOo/LO users when I say this. I hate having to always export a PDF version so that I can email to friends (for one, they can’t edit it) because I can never be sure enough that it’ll display exactly the same if I send a .doc/.odt file. I hate constantly having to dual-boot into Windows just to edit a document, like I often have to do.

Going back to the German Foreign Office’s decision to switch to Windows, I can empathise how poor word processing / spreadsheet support can be a show-stopper for a major government division since OpenOffice.org is the only document editing suite that comes anywhere close to functional on Linux. (Don’t kid yourself. Abiword and Gnumeric don’t count.) And yet, there is indignation among the FOSS community calling the reason for switching ‘implausible’ and much vitriol thrown in the form of users-are-stupid / Windows-is-bloatware ad hominem attacks.

Part of the problem I think has its roots in hacker-developers writing software for the masses. Anecdotal evidence suggests that hacker-developers often aren’t heavy users of document suites, so maybe they don’t really feel the pinch in a way general users do. There are usability bugs such as this (in OOo) that have been around for seven years with no resolution. They maybe be perfectly happy typing out documents in LaTeX on vim so their definition of what’s a show-stopper differs very much from a lay user’s definition of show-stopper.

LibreOffice has a well-defined release criteria to define what type of bugs can be considered to be ‘release blockers’, and while in their books document rendering compatibility is a not a ‘major’ issue, for a lay user it is. I understand that releases cannot be delayed forever and if releases are held off forever till everything is polished to perfection then nothing will ever come out. The rationale is that what’s crucial to one subset of users may not as be important for a second subset of users. My feeling is that Joel Spolsky gets it bang on target when he says:

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20″ rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

I don’t know whether I belong to a minority that requires solid table rendering support while most others get along fine without it, but it could be that the bugs or missing features turn people off from using the software in the first place. Because I know that OOo/LO handles formatting incorrectly and sometimes straight up eats data, I keep a dual boot install of Windows 7 just so that I can edit documents in Office 2010 Starter. I put up with it, but how many other users would you expect to?

Therein lies the core problem for OpenOffice.org and its soon-to-be-prevalent fork LibreOffice: as long as there’s the slightest hint of doubt on how well it interoperates with the dominant Office ecosystem, they will never be the preferred choice for business/enterprise or even personal-use scenarios. It will always remain a “…but yeah we can save some money as long as we can live with some unreadable documents”. Actually, that goes for competitors like Google Docs too that have similar compatibility issues. I would never consider using Google’s Chrome OS as all that Google Docs can handle are simple formatted documents. Setting expectations right should also be taken into consideration; if the LibreOffice install that corrupted my presentation was a beta or an RC, then I’d have been more cautious, expected certain things to not work. But it wasn’t – 3.3.1 was a final release. What’s the rush to release a final version instead of longer beta testing periods?

The FOSS community on the whole needs to listen to voices who are coming forward to say, “Look, this doesn’t work for us.” like on this Slashdot thread. Admitting the fact that there are areas in which features are lacking is the first step towards making progress rather than making remarks that can be considered callous or snide by new adopters. What OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice need to do is deal with even minor annoyances like Canonical did with its 100 Papercuts project. (I applaud Canonical for caring about users and taking steps such as this to improve usability overall.) It’s encouraging that LibreOffice is already taking a step in this direction.

Still, it’s early days in LibreOffice’s existence. The reason the project forked from OpenOffice.org was a culmination of a long festering resentment of how the development was proceeding and there were often political reasons why changes were not contributed back to OOo (Go-oo, etc). I hope that under new leadership and new supporters such as Canonical and Novell, LibreOffice develops into a much more mature offering.

Until then, I can only pray that I can read/write files without a hitch.

Nope, not a Thinkpad. That's Google's Cr-48 netbook, er, notebook. 'Cr' is the element symbol for 'chromium', in case you didn't know.

Running applications ‘off the cloud’ (storing everything online) is something you can already do on existing netbooks, laptops, desktops – you can even get the same experience by installing Chrome Web Apps as you’d want on Chrome OS from the Chrome store. So if a Chrome OS netbook is priced higher or the same as a normal netbook, I don’t see why I should buy the former.

The touted 10-second bootup speeds that Chrome OS has is not because it’s significantly better than others, but because it uses a solid state disk rather than a normal hard disk. Try booting Ubuntu on an SSD system and you’ll get similar startup times. (It’ll be a bit more, but come on – isn’t an extra five seconds worth it for having a ‘full’ system?) Chrome OS is essentially a Linux-based operating system just like Ubuntu, except that they are purposefully blocking access to anything other than your ‘online filesystem’.

This is all moot for the casual user of course – they’ll love it. With Google’s marketing might, Chrome OS might even be a success in the way netbooks haven’t been. But they’ll potentially open themselves up for anti-trust lawsuits from their competitors. Google has been able to avoid such allegations till now in the search engine market simply by saying “Users can choose a different search engine anytime they want“. That’s the not the case with Chrome OS – you have to sign in with a Google account.

When Google’s distributing 60,000 test notebooks at no charge, destroying 25 for this video must have been approved without so much as eyebrow being raised.

Once you start using Chrome OS at home, you’d be forced to use it at office and other places too. That easy-sharing of documents with friends and family? Well, that just means they’ll have to sign up for Google Accounts too to access shared files. Chrome OS simply leads to a scenario where everything is tightly locked in to Google’s network, with not much hope of switching. You simply can’t copy your files and shift from Windows to Mac (say) as you can do with normal computers. If you decide one day to shift to Microsoft Office Web Apps instead of Google Docs, how do you migrate your data? What if you want to use Skype instead of Google Voice Chat? Skype doesn’t even have a web app version!

I also don’t buy the argument some tech analysts have made that Chrome OS could be posturing itself as a cheap IT solution for enterprise use, at the long tail of the usage chain with adoption as point-of-sale terminals and mobile workforce. IT departments for companies are usually wary of vendor lock-ins, and though Chrome OS may be cheap to deploy I don’t reckon companies would want to give up complete control in the way that would be required of them.

With this tight lock, with the user constantly signed in to Google, they have a pretty solid idea of what you do all the time, not just what you search. They’d want to capitalize on this rich amount of usage data by trying to serve more targetted advertising. If Google sticks on to its current vision AND Chrome OS becomes a success, it’s inevitable that their competitors will have a very strong anti-trust case in the courts. Such an anti-trust case could very well bring Google as we know it close to oblivion, just like what almost happened in United States vs Microsoft.

Thank you, but no thank you Google. I’ll stick to my netbook which gives me complete freedom to do what I want.

PS – If, however, you’ve already been seduced by Google Chrome OS’ s ‘always online’ vision but can’t try it out because you aren’t in the Cr-48 pilot programme, give Jolicloud a go. It’s an Ubuntu-based cloud OS much like Chrome OS; additionally, also an HTML5-based web-OS that you can try out in the Chrome Web Store. One of the complaints against Chrome OS has been that it doesn’t play Flash videos very well, which I’ve heard Jolicloud has sorted out (supports playback of HD Flash videos).

Jolicloud's cloud-based OS

Firstly, one of the major reasons why I was reluctant to shift was that my hosting account is paid for till 2012 – and it just seemed to be a waste of money to abandon it and upgrade to a VPS host. I surely wouldn’t have left any of the sites hosted here behind in case I was shifting to a new server, so what would I do with my shared hosting account then?

Secondly, VPS hosting services usually cost around $20-25 per month (well, at least the reliable ones do) and at the same time, GoDaddy was offering a beta test of their new Grid Hosting service at $5 per month. I was sorely tempted to take that offer, I must admit. I searched around on the Internet, and sadly most of the search results that showed up were either affiliate links to GoDaddy’s Grid Hosting Beta sign up page, Todd Cochrane praising it on behalf of his blog’s sponsor (GoDaddy – no surprises there) with a promise to try the service out (never materialized, as far as I see), curious souls inquiring in forums as to whether anyone else had used it, and a few horror stories. I wasn’t willing to jump the gun and pass judgement on a beta service that I hadn’t tried. I let it be for then.

Fast forward to now. I have been using GoDaddy Grid Hosting for close to two months now, and I wanted to share my impression of it thus far. There is a serious lack of reviews from actual customers of the product on the Web. I hope that this post will be one of the many opinions on offered on the product as more customers start using it – for better or worse.

What is ‘grid hosting’, and why are hosting companies offering such services now?

Allow me to give a brief explanation to those who are new to this; you can skip to the next heading in case you don’t want a lesson on the basics.

A normal shared hosting environment has a single server machine where hundreds – sometimes thousands, depending on which company is your host – reside. All of these websites share a single IP address as they are on the same server. When a browser sends a request to your website’s nameserver, the hosting company resolves it internally at their end and serves up your web page from that particular server.

A visual explanation of how shared hosting deployment works. (C) GalaxyVisions.com

This setup works fine for most low traffic websites – and for ‘static’ websites that load HTML files that do not change. Until a few years ago, this is what most websites used to be so shared hosting worked fine for a large population of websites. Most websites these days though are ‘dynamically’ generated either by custom-coded scripts, or increasingly popular content management systems like WordPress. What WordPress does is that it stores your content in a database, then every time a visitor wants to view your website it checks what sort of styling to use (from your theme), any sort of processing done by plugins (converting links to YouTube into embedded videos, for example), converts the end result into an HTML file and sends it to the visitor’s browser. All this happens within seconds.

But. Let’s say your website starts getting a more steady stream of visitors or sees a sudden spike in traffic. Your web server now has to process more of these page generation requests in real-time and dispatch the generated HTML file. (To some extent, this can be countered by using ‘caching’ plugins that temporarily store the result of database calls and/or generated HTML files and use that to cut down user load times.)

In a universe where your server has infinite computing resources, this wouldn’t matter because the server would have infinite computing resources at its disposal. Unfortunately, the economics of reality dictate that a single machine can only handle so many requests before giving up the ghost. And this is particularly true of shared hosting these days: any single website is allocated only a small chunk of computing resources on the server, and even then heavy traffic to a completely different website on the same server can cause bottlenecks that slow down everyone else. Indeed, a ‘rogue’ website could cause a server to crash, taking down the hundreds/thousands of websites on the same server along with it. (Usually, hosts don’t let this happen; opting instead to kill of your site if it starts putting extra load on its servers rather than risking downtime.)

Typical traffic spike seen when, say, your website gets featured on Digg. (C) jazzychad.net

With an ever-increasing number of websites taxing single server setups, shared hosting companies these days have been under fire from customers for slow loading times. The traditional method to deal with these issues has been to invest in more servers and make lesser number of websites share the same server. That way, each individual site gets a greater than (earlier) share of resources and – hopefully – functions faster.

Grid hosting is a new approach being adopted by companies such as MediaTemple (they’re the first ones to commercially offer such services on a mass scale, I think) – and now GoDaddy – to solve this problem. The idea is that instead of your site’s data living on a single machine and being subjected to the limits of that single machine, your data is mirrored across multiple machines. When a browser request to view your site is received by the host, a set of load balancing servers forwards the request to one of the many servers where you data lives. This way, in case your website – or any other website – suddenly receives a large amount of traffic, the load can be distributed. By using a divide and conquer approach, a single website theoretically cannot take down others with it. Another advantage is that if one server is taken offline for maintenance, your website need not have to go offline because copies of it still exist on other machines.

You won’t commonly see grid hosting services offered since the technology is still in its infancy. It has been made economically possible at a mass scale by recent advances in cloud computing. MediaTemple, the pioneer of this concept, rapidly gained a lot of customers on the premise of greater reliability and a few years ago, it was the darling of many bloggers. Things soured when technology didn’t live up to the hype and many sites suffered greater downtime. One of the major glitches with grid-hosting services across the board has been how to implement scaling with MySQL databases. Because of the nature of the setup, MySQL databases in grid hosting environment often live on a different server(s) compared to a site’s file store server; quite often, it was turning out that database fetches were a bottleneck. MediaTemple itself acknowledged the problem by starting development on a new setup they dub mt Cluster Server – slated to eventually replace their Grid Server offering.

Why switch to GoDaddy Grid Hosting now?

Until a few months ago, the only way to shift to GoDaddy’s Grid Hosting beta service was to sign up for a new account (= pay again for that new account), then shift all files and database over manually. Then, GoDaddy started offering automated upgrades to grid hosting beta – only if there were no active databases associated with your account. If it did, you were required to delete them from your account and restore them once the automated upgrade was done.

GoDaddy’s Grid Hosting service is now out of beta. I was surprised to learn from one of their representatives on Twitter that all new GoDaddy hosting accounts are actually ‘grid’ accounts. They had also started offering automated upgrades all accounts – regardless of database usage associated with the account. As a major web host with millions of customers, it must have taken a lot of courage on their part to make such a drastic change! The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that they really believed their offering was ready for prime time. After all, a broken system would only increase their costs in terms of having to handle a larger number of customer support requests (and bad publicity).

The horror stories from previous customers (when it was in beta, mind you) did play on my mind. Still, I decided to take a leap of faith two months ago. With loading times as they were on my account, I reckoned that there was no way I could go downhill from there.

The automated upgrade took about 24 hours to take effect, during which the sites hosted on my account didn’t go down (although my access to hosting control panel was cut). Once the switch was done, I didn’t have to make any changes manually nor were there any major ‘obvious’ problems such as sites not loading at all. I was apprehensive that something might have broken as the absolute file storage path of the associated hosting account gets changed during the move, but that ultimately was a non-issue.

How does GoDaddy Grid Hosting measure up?

Right off the bat, sites seemingly loaded faster. I asked a few people and they felt the same. This, however, is a subjective assessment: the mere suggestion of a ‘faster’ server might bias opinions to page loads ‘feeling’ faster. I compared some statistics instead to check whether it was indeed faster.

YSlow analysis for ankurb.info after switch to grid hosting

I started off with a simple test – using YSlow for Firebug. Taking care to switch the measurement rule set to ‘Small Site or Blog’ to measure the performance before and after the switch. Using the normal metric for large sites, this blog was given grade ‘C’ by YSlow; after the switch to ‘blog’ ruleset, the grade jumped up to grade ‘A’. You can try out the test yourself, if you’re curious. You’ll notice that the low scoring sections within the test are caused mostly due the usage of ad servers.

Next, I measured the page loading time using Pingdom’s excellent page load analysis tool. Unlike many other similar tools that simply record the response time, Pingdom’s tool measures actual page load times as users experience it, including media downloads.

Response time stats for ankurb.info - May 2010 to November 2010

The above graph shows the response time recorded by Pingdom for my blog for the past six months. You’ll notice that despite the spikes in the graph, on average the response time stayed pretty much the same. Does that mean that my blog loaded equally fast throughout? No. Response time is a metric that’s useful, but not for this analysis – as it merely tells the time the server takes to send an acknowledgement response to the first request sent by a browser.

Page load time for individual components on my blog, after switching to grid hosting.

Using the Pingdom’s page load timing analysis tool that I mentioned earlier (as opposed to response time analysis), I measured the actual page load times. In my case, the total page load time came out to 2.49 seconds after the switch to grid hosting. Previously, it used to be around 15 seconds, so that’s a big improvement! I’ve repeated the test on multiple occasions, and the result unanimously seems to be that site loading is faster after the switch to grid hosting – and by a significant factor. Your mileage may vary depending on where/when you’re testing from.

It appears then that page loads are indeed faster now. But how does grid hosting hold up under increased traffic load? To test this, I used Load Impact’s load testing tool. What this does is that it simulates the effect of multiple visitors requesting the same site at the same time, and measures how the server performs. I only have a free account on the service, so I could only carry out their 50-client test. The statistics are quite revealing.

Concurrent client request load test - GoDaddy legacy shared hosting environment

Load Impact starts off with 10 simulated clients simultaneously sending a request to the server, scaling up the number of clients in steps to the maximum limit (50 in my case) as long as the server can cope up. As you can see, at the start of the test the actual page load time is 10 seconds but as the test progresses, the performance degraded to 15 seconds. You can’t see it on this graph, but at 50 clients the test had to be aborted because the server couldn’t keep up with the requests any longer.

Concurrent client load test - GoDaddy Grid Hosting environment

Now, look at the same test run on my blog after the switch to GoDaddy Grid Hosting. Right at the start, you can see page load time is lower – close to the approximately 3 seconds measured by Pingdom. As the number of clients increases, the performance remains consistent; in fact, evening hinting towards a downward trend. This time, the test completed successfully with a maximum load of 50 clients simultaneously hitting the site. This doesn’t seem surprising, as GoDaddy’s own documentation notes that in the legacy hosting environment the maximum number of simultaneous client requests supported is 200 (on the costliest plan) while for grid hosting the same figure is up to 600 simultaneous connections. While this varies depending on what plan you are on, at the very least your allowance is increased to thrice of what it was earlier. It’s interesting to note that in the legacy hosting environment, the load test had to be aborted at 50 clients – a figure much lower than the ‘maximum’ limit for my account then.

For better understanding of how Grid Hosting performs, it would obviously be better to repeat the test with a higher number of concurrent client requests. Unfortunately, I can’t do that with my free Load Impact account. Nevertheless, the hint of a downward trend – if it holds up with greater traffic – shows that the grid cluster does indeed in real-time detect traffic spikes and compensate accordingly. Possibly, load getting distributed across multiple machines during a spike could lead to the lower page load times.

What about downtime? How reliable exactly is GoDaddy? Heading back to Pingdom, once again, I checked what the data has to say. The way Pingdom checks whether my site is up or not is to send a request at regular intervals and monitoring whether (and how long) the server takes to reply. Pingdom is sweet enough to the tell the IP address(es) they use for this test, which makes it a cinch to exclude its visits from visitors analytics. Before I show the graphs, note that my Pingdom account is set to send a request every 5 minutes; thus, the precision of the data below is limited by that. For instance, if the real downtime period during any given occurrence was 13 minutes, Pingdom will only find out at the 15th minute that the site is back up on its next check. Keep this granularity of data in mind when analyzing.

Downtime report - (May 2010 to November 2010)

The data shows that on average GoDaddy has given me an uptime of about 99.2% over the past six months. Even though there have been outages, as expected on any host, they have occurred through small, cumulative incidents rather than any single long one. As such, the chances of visitors noticing are negligibly small, in the larger scheme of things.

Downtime report (November 2010)

However, drilling into the data for the past month shows that uptime has gone down to 99.76%; also, in the timeframe of past six months, almost half of the outages occurred in the past month. I set email alerts for downtime, and looking through those it seems that while earlier the outages used to be 10-15 minutes long after the switch to grid hosting they are mostly just 5 minutes long (except for one long 20 minute one) but at a greater frequency. It could be possible that those ’5 minute’ or ’10 minute’ outages were actually shorter; as I explained earlier how the pings are carried out only at five-minute intervals. If they are indeed shorter, then that would imply a higher uptime in reality. Maybe someone with a more frequent ping test will be able to shed some light. As a customer, I am satisfied so far with this reliability. The tiny downtime periods don’t mean much on a personal blog. Your site’s requirements might be different though.

Moving on to memory usage / CPU cycles, I am not sure on what metrics to use to compare the performance. I’ll go ahead and mention anecdotal evidence instead, which may shed some light. I use Gallery2 photo gallery software on my hosting account, on which certain interactions can be considered as ‘intensive’. (I know it sounds laughable, but when it comes to shared hosting accounts that’s probably the closest you’d come to ‘taxing’ your account.)

In GoDaddy’s older hosting environment, I couldn’t add more than six images at one go to any album. Let me clarify that statement – every time you upload pictures or ask Gallery2 to check a folder on your server for new images (the usual way I add pictures), it adds the images one-by-one while creating thumbnails for them during the process. Every time I did this in the old setup, the process would time out after importing roughly six photos. I assume this has something to do with the script execution time limits that GoDaddy had that. Sure, you can increase it using php.ini settings but I don’t think GoDaddy allowed any scripts that took more than 30 seconds to execute to stay running.

There is a marked difference in the grid hosting setup with this. I have successfully imported close to 200 photos in the same import session – with all thumbnails successfully generated too – without a hiccup. Gallery2 displays the amount of memory being used for the operation, which is currently shown as 128 MB during the operations; earlier, it used to be 32-64 MB. While no longer shown on the current web hosting packages page on GoDaddy (essentially grid hosting, since that’s the default setup now), when it was in beta I distinctly remember that GoDaddy mentioned grid accounts can use ‘unlimited’ CPU cycles. Take ‘unlimited’ with a pinch of salt; though, for most purposes the grid setup will allow you to execute longer-running scripts with greater memory allocation.

Did you face any problems after switching to grid hosting?

Yes, I did. Going back to my Gallery2 install, I noticed that after the switch, thumbnails stopped appearing on gallery front page. (I use a plugin that switches album thumbnails randomly to a different image, to keep it visually different.) Before the switch, I was using ImageMagick along with jpegtran (the latter for editing operations such as cropping, rotating, etc – where it’s useful as it supports lossless JPEG file saves), both taken from the pre-installed paths available for hosting accounts. For future reference, the paths to them are:

ImageMagick (v6): /usr/local/bin/imagemagick

jpegtran: /usr/bin/jpegtran

Both worked fine with my Gallery2 install in the shared hosting environment. In grid hosting however, Gallery2 encountered errors using them despite the fact that it detected those paths were valid. I switched the image toolkit used by Gallery2 to GD instead, and now everything works just fine.

Apart from this, I faced no other problems. I did carry out one further modification. I already have gzip compression enabled for web pages served on my blog. Gzip compression compresses web pages before dispatched from the server in case the capability is supported by a browser (true for most modern browsers). It reduces bandwidth usage and makes page loads faster by reducing the amount of data to be downloaded to display the page. For blogs showing many pages on the home/landing page, it’s quite handy. Gzip compression can be done by adding the following line of code right at the top of your PHP files (before DOCTYPE):

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

After the switch to grid hosting, I also decided to enable Zend Optimizer support on my account. Zend Optimizer increases security, by obfuscating PHP code used on a site with Zend Guard; basically, it makes your code a tiny bit more secure by hiding the actual code being executed by your server. Zend Optimizer is pre-installed on GoDaddy servers and can be enabled in your account by adding the following lines of code to the php.ini file in your account:

[Zend]
zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
zend_extension_manager.optimizer=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.3
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.3
zend_extension=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.3/ZendExtensionManager.so
zend_extension_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.3/ZendExtensionManager_TS.so

Zend Optimizer comes with an extensive user guide that you can use in case you want to play around with the settings defined by the code above. Note that version pre-installed is a slightly older version, but for normal usage that’s okay.

In case you do specifically need a newer version of Zend / ImageMagick / any other library, you could always place the binaries in a folder in your own hosting account and point whatever application that needs it to that particular path.

Would I recommend GoDaddy Grid Hosting?

While it is early days yet, if the current level of service continues I would say “yes” to the above question. GoDaddy seems to have overcome the teething issues its beta grid hosting service had, and gone on to implement it successfully in a production environment. Existing customers need not worry about having to adjust to a new control panel either, as the one used for grid hosting is identical to legacy shared hosting.

GoDaddy has had a bad reputation as a web hosting company, but I haven’t had any bad experiences so far. More often than not, it’s a case of customers expecting too much from economical shared hosting. Many first-time webmasters only look for storage / bandwidth offerings, assume GoDaddy is a good deal, and then howl when traffic / resource intensive sites work sluggishly on it. At least GoDaddy has clearly defined policies on the actual parameters that affect account performance such number of concurrent client requests allowed – something that not many other popular shared hosting companies are forthcoming about.

One popular complaint has been that GoDaddy’s custom control panel doesn’t offer enough…control. I whole-heartedly agree that was indeed that case two years ago and I’d have preferred to use CPanel instead in those days. Now, however, the upgraded custom control panel that GoDaddy has gives access / customizability to pretty much everything that a CPanel setup would offer – and in a cleaner interface. Facilities not offered earlier (SSH access, for instance) are now offered and have been available for many moons now.

Another ‘feature’ added by GoDaddy (sadly, available only for new customers) is the choice of geographical location for the server farm your account will belong. Now you can choose between US (existing Scottsdale, Arizona farm), Europe (based in Netherlands), and Asia (based in Singapore) as the location for where you want your account to be. The advantage is that if you / majority of your visitors are from Europe / Asia, you can choose a server that is physically closer to them – and thus faster site loading times / greater reliability of site availability as browser requests don’t have to travel a greater distance. It’s a small thing, but during instances such as when undersea cables off the coast of Egypt got severed, hampering access to US-hosted websites from countries like India, having a server physically closer to where most of the visitors are means your site will be accessible even when many others are not.

Steps such as these show that GoDaddy is indeed listening to customer feedback and taking steps to improve its offerings. When Google announced its release of mod_pagespeed Apache server module, GoDaddy was one of the first and largest web hosts mentioned who are working on implementing it (although Dreamhost did show them the middle finger by implementing it first). GoDaddy is extremely proactive in providing support to distressed customers through social media, and even when contacting their tech support via email I’ve never once had a problem with their service.

I mentioned earlier that I gave thought to switching because my sites were slowing down on this account. Having already invested into this account was a deterrent, but if things got worse I’d have been compelled to cut my losses and move on. The question is – if I did move, then what do I go to? I was apprehensive of MediaTemple because I’ve heard stories of its Grid Server plan being unreliable, and if I shifted to another shared hosting provider, what was the guarantee that it would work any better in comparison?

Overall, a big thumbs up to GoDaddy Grid Hosting from me. It seems that finally there’s a grid hosting offering that just works – and that too at standard shared hosting prices rather than a premium. If you’re a Grid customer too, I’d love to know what your experience has been. Do leave a comment / link to your own take on it below!

Disclaimer: None of the links listed in the post are affiliate links, although you will find banners ads from GoDaddy (if you don’t use AdBlock already ;) ) on this blog. Still, if you decide to sign up with GoDaddy, found this blog post useful in making that decision, and want to thank me for it here’s an affiliate link to sign up for GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans.

So anyway, I was bored and was having a conversation about blogging with someone. It reminded me of this short blog post done a couple of weeks ago by Aditya titled Not So Social. I have been meaning to write about the same for a while; it’s just that only now have I got the time to procrastinate. This is not a rebuttal; rather, a my views on the same issue. To summarize, that blog post speaks of how we might be losing the fun in having conversations purely because “there’s nothing to speak about” since “it’s all on social networking sites anyway”.

I’m not really sure whether that’s the case. “So, what have you been up to?” is merely a conversation starter, not a conversation in itself. And it would be naïve to think that mere 140-character status updates or even “a hundred pictures pretty much tells the story”. Life experiences – be they funny, bitter, jubilatory – are complex narratives that no amount of ‘lifestreaming‘ through statuses and pictures can replace.

But what social tools do allow us to do is to have an inkling of what’s going in the life of those nearest and not-so-nearest-but-added-on-Facebook-anyway-because-we-have-mutual-friend. What it allows you to do is to begin a conversation with “So, how did you end up with a tiger in your bathroom after that party?” than merely enquiring a limp “Wazzup?” It does not, in any way, take anything away from the ensuing conversation itself. Conversations are about exchanging experiences, not facts.

I don’t know whether you have heard of Dunbar’s number, but it’s a theory that humans have a limit to the number of ‘social’ relationships they can maintain at any time. Social tools allow you to keep in touch with your ‘Dunbar’ group, and even beyond that. You don’t have to read everything everyone posts. To take just one example, Twitter isn’t email, nor is Twitter a competition. Friends / followers / cult members aren’t Pokémon toys that need to be collected. (Yes, thank you for pointing out – I know I have strayed from the topic for a bit.) Regardless of that, ‘social tools’ allow you to stay in the loop as to what’s happening in your friend circle, and then gives you the ability to pick and choose conversations that you think can will be engaging.

Speaking of uploading ‘hundreds of pictures’ being posted on social networks, I think Facebook (and to a lesser extent, photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa Web) has brought about a fundamental rethinking of what used to be a ‘Kodak moment’. In the days of film photography when the west was wild, cameras came with 36-snap films, and processing was expensive – you didn’t take chances. You lined people up akin to an identity parade in front of a landmark and asked them to speak cheesy lines.

The ubiquitousness of mobile / digital cameras means that now you can capture spontaneous moments without a second blink. Sure, this gives the license to some people to upload 378 pictures from a single party to Facebook under an album titled ‘Randommmmmmm 3!&!!&!&’. But if used wisely, (i.e., exercise at least some restraint in clicking, or at least when uploading, pictures) this form of lifestreaming not only gives your friend circle (in the short-term) something to start off with when chatting but also gives you a long-term record of your life at various points in your, well, life. Even Kodak, one of the most hopelessly out-of-touch technology companies, has figured out that the modern ‘Kodak moment’ is no longer the act of taking a picture, but the act of sharing a picture.

You might not think much of it now, but all those byte-sized text updates and pictures albums with spontaneous moments captured is a living scrapbook of your life at those points. Nobody is saying that your online persona is a perfect reconstruction of the real-life you; still, a digital archive of moments is something that you (and your friends) can look back and cherish. This isn’t just about the conversation you could have next week, but the conversation that you could have six years down the line about this week – augmented by your digital scrapbook. (I know, it’s difficult to do so now. Those features will come eventually, as I think enough people will feel the need for something like that.)

What makes me come out so strongly in support of social media? I would put it down to the fact that it’s almost end-of-term, and I just realise – looking back all the content from this year – as to how much I miss not having a more extensive ‘archive’ of my life earlier.

Just remember to not obnoxiously keep your digital camera’s shutter pressed down. ;)

* If you’re the sort who tweets the colour of your poop while on the shitter, mixing ‘lulz’ with ‘dyhrea’ in an ungodly mixture of words post a session of eating cheap quesedillas, then none of the above justifications for ‘lifestreaming’ applies to you. You’re a fucking twat.