Last days of Cingular TDMA

Mar 23, 2006 | blog

According to this RCR Wireless article, Cingular Wireless will be shutting down their TDMA and analog networks in 2008.  This will be the beginning of the end for consumer analog cellular phone service, as it fits in with the government’s timetable for analog to digital transition.

Cingular’s plans are nothing new, as the migration of the user base from analog to digital has progressed for many years.  The announcement is the start of the implementation plan and will probably get a little tweak here and there as customers either start migrating sooner, or add their comments, concerns & complaints to the companies plans.

What this really brings to Cingular (and other carriers as they phase out analog) is the reclaiming of needed wireless bandwidth to support the new GSM/GPRS/EDGE & UMTS/HSDPA networks that replace them.  In the end, it’ll be a good thing and you will see additional coverage even out some of the existing “dead” or marginal spots.

Russ on PayPal Mobile

Mar 22, 2006 | blog

Kind of get the impression that Russell Beattie likes PayPal’s new mobile service.  I’ve been waiting for a service like this to finally make it to the US, should be kind of neat.  Should be interesting, but I’m a little hesitant to jump right into the service – I’ll probably watch and see what some others think on the experience.

Thanks for the tip Russ!

Windows Vista 2007

Mar 22, 2006 | blog

So who out there hasn’t heard that the consumer release of Windows Vista has slipped again?

I’m not going to rant on Micrsoft about this – I’m one of those people that belives that any product destined to reside on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide should be as close to perfect as possible.

Kudos Microsoft!

The important thing with an OS upgrade with the scope of Vista is stability.  As both a corporate IT architect and a home consumer of MS producs, I have an expectation of technology.  Usually I’m the one that accepts the glitches, the anomolies, the problems with most software.  I simply either work around them, or understand that that is how the program simply “works”, or don’t even notice.  To be precise, I understand how it works and accept the faults as a matter of course.

This outlook of mine has started to change in the last few months or so, and with Vista I’ve changed my expectations more than I thought I ever would.  More and more, I am using technology for a reason, not simply because technology is cool.  There are tons of cool things out there, electronics, software, golf clubs, whatever… but this time cool isn’t going to cut it.  I am anticipating not just “the most stable version of Windows yet” (which incidentally I’ve already had several times – NT, Win98, W2K, XP), but the most usable system as well.

Well here is looking forward to the future – it’ll be closer to a year from now to walk into the store and pick up a retail version of Vista, but it should be worth it.

As an aside – when the public preview comes out, you should try the new OS out.  It is definitely different, though not radically so, and will take quite a bit of getting used to.

Projects, Projects, Projects…

Mar 22, 2006 | blog

If not at home, then most definitely at work. So I’ve got a lot going on at work, getting a VPN upgrade ready to move into pilot phase, participating on a revision to our project methodology, wrapping up 14 updates to our standard Windows Image, disaster recovery planning, documentatin, trying not to start on our BlackBerry project, and various other pieces of this and that. No wonder I can’t seem to find the time to keep up on the news, read my favorite blogs, and of course, blog on my own site. Never enough time, guess we’ll have to try and make some :).

What to do with an old blog

Mar 21, 2006 | blog

Recently I’ve been wondering what to do with the posts on my old blog(s). Before setting up shop here at RickMahn.com, I had tried out MSN Spaces, Blogger, and then WordPress.com. Each of which allowed me to learn more about what blogging is, introduced me to the blogosphere, and let me experiment with different platforms. As I learned more about the tools, I started to settle on the platform that seemed to work best for me. That was WordPress. The experience over at WordPress.com convinced me that it was the best blogging platform for me – though I wanted to have full control of the system, server, etc… so I ended up setting up my own hosted WordPress installation.

A recent post by Kent Newsome got me thinking about it, though I’ve not the same problem that he describes. I was kind of testing the waters and since I was not a pioneer in blogging, or even a real early adopter, I’ve the luxury of being able to find out what everyone else’s opinions of the free sites, the pay sites, and the “go it your own way” crowd thinks about all the blogging choices. And taking that all in, I’m glad that I can sort of start from scratch with my system of choice and work toward the future.

Now Kent is right, it will probably be up to WordPress to create a good migration tool to support migrating from a different platform to WordPress as large companies like Blogger (Google) stand to loose ad revenue from people leaving their system and want to discourage anyone from doing so. Of course WordPress has an Import utility which should word for my needs, but would not work for Kent’s as he has a lot of history on his site and would need to keep the permalinks to all existing content. And that is the real challenge, not just to Import existing posts & comments, but to migrate them in such a way as to keep all the links alive and functioning for reference, search bots, etc…

This is an opportunity for some enterprising programmer to come up with a migration tool to support the major blogging platforms. As time goes on, each platform will win or loose user favor and one thing should be simple – the migration of a blog from one platform to another. Anyone going to take up the challenge?

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