Today, the CTO of Verizon Wireless again brought up the concept of billing content providers for data headed to wireless subscribers. AT&T has brought this up in the past as well. Today, with the high penetration of capped data plans, Im significantly less opposed to this idea…executed a certain way…than I once was. Heck, I might even be in favor of it, given some parameters.

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Sometime over the past weekend my Skype account, which I’ve had for eight-plus years, got suspended. Something about someone maybe accessing it in an unauthorized manner. Not that this didn’t happen…I had a weak password on the account…but my guess is that I simply signed on from a different IP and that somehow set off all kinds of alarms. I’ll probably never know since, unlike GMail, Skype doesn’t appear to make that kind of information available to its account-holders.

Anyway, I got my Skype account back, but the interaction I had with Skype customer service was less than straightforward.

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If you’re into dance/drum ‘n’ bass/house/etc. style music, the BBC has a weekly two-hour mix from a featured artist (including such names as Groove Armada, Daft Punk and Skrillex). It’s called the Essential Mix and it’s available online. This week’s selection replaces last week’s with no recourse…if you stick to the BBC’s own site. The solution: YouTube or Grooveshark. If you’re into that sort of thing, enjoy!

Say you’re using PHP via its CLI (command line interface) on Bash (probably via SSH). You want to show colors for some reason (e.g. that non-standard test script that I wrote recently, to be replaced with PHPUnit momentarily). Colorizing text is fortunately surprisingly easy, though I found it rather difficult to find the magical escaped strings that you need to perform the colorization.

So here they are, as PHP defines (so you can use them, once you declare them, without worrying about scope issues):

	// set up terminal colorization
	define(T_RESET,"\33[0m");
	define(T_BLACK,"\33[0;30m");
	define(T_DARKGRAY,"\33[1;30m");
	define(T_BLUE,"\33[0;34m");
	define(T_LIGHTBLUE,"\33[1;34m");
	define(T_GREEN,"\33[0;32m");
	define(T_LIGHTGREEN,"\33[1;32m");
	define(T_CYAN,"\33[0;36m");
	define(T_LIGHTCYAN,"\33[1;36m");
	define(T_RED,"\33[0;31m");
	define(T_LIGHTRED,"\33[1;31m");
	define(T_PURPLE,"\33[0;35m");
	define(T_LIGHTPURPLE,"\33[1;35m");
	define(T_BROWN,"\33[0;33m");
	define(T_YELLOW,"\33[1;33m");
	define(T_LIGHTGRAY,"\33[0;37m");
	define(T_WHITE,"\33[1;37m");

Insert the color you want by prepending the text to colorize with the color of choice, then appending T_RESET at the end to restore standard terminal colorization (since the user’s terminal may not be set as white-on-black).

So with all the news of T-Mobile adding 3G on PCS frequencies (iPhone and iPad compatible), I had to check out how much spectrum in the various bands the “big five” (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Leap/CricKet in this case) have here in the Denver metro…

NOTE: The numbers after the overall MHz per band are the bandwidths of each license. Most licenses are paired (upstream+downstream) however some licenses (like one of AT&T’s 700 licenses) are not paired, so they’ll be a little harder to shoehorn into a bandplan. I’m also only counting cellular/PCS/AWS/700MHz in the total.

AT&T
700 - 30MHz (6+6 + 6+6 + 6)
AWS - 30MHz (10+10 + 5+5)
PCS - 70MHz (5+5 + 15+15 + 15+15)
Cellular - 25MHz (12.5+12.5)
Total: 155MHz

Leap (CricKet)
AWS - 10MHz (5+5)
PCS - 40MHz (5+5 + 15+15)
Total: 50MHz 

Sprint
PCS - 40MHz (5+5 + 15+15)

T-Mobile
AWS - 20MHz (10+10)
PCS - 60MHz (15+15 + 15+15)
Total: 80MHz 

Verizon
700 - 34MHz (6+6 + 11+11)
PCS - 30MHz (15+15)
Cellular - 25MHz (12.5+12.5)
Total:  89MHz

If Verizon is able to buy spectrum from SpectrumCo (partially owned by Comcast), they’ll get 20MHz of AWS in addition to what they have now, bringing them to 109MHz in the area. They’re fighting with the government on this one.

The clear winner in terms of spectrum availability in Denver is AT&T, with over 150MHz at their disposal. Of this, 60MHz is in LTE bands (AWS and 700 for AT&T), hile the remainder (95MHz) is in bands used for 2G and 3G. You’d think AT&T would have a phenomenal user experience in Denver due to this, but I’ve been unimpressed when I’ve used their service. Go figure.

Verizon is next, closely followed by none other than T-Mobile. Verizon’s holdings include a nice chunk of 700MHz and a fair amount of PCS and cellular spectrum. Leap and Sprint bring up the rear, with only 40MHz of PCS spectrum for each (Leap has a bit of AWS spectrum; Sprint has none).

Two final thoughts:

1. T-Mobile has a lot of PCS spectrum in Denver. Almost as much as AT&T in fact. So, with significantly less customers on the band, their new push for PCS 3G spectrum will have pretty awesome results. New iPad using T-Mobile’s PCS HSPA+ dual-carrier network? Count me in!
2. AT&T’s “we need spectrum” cry (which was loud and clear during the T-Mobile merger attempt) rings a bit hollow here. They would still be the top spectrum owner in Denver even if they gave all of their AWS spectrum to T-Mobile and Verizon’s SpectrumCo AWS purchase went through. I will say though that, if AT&T is required to hand over their AWS in Denver to T-Mobile, TMo will have a lot to work with as they start deploying LTE (and maybe HSPA+ 84).

Today I’m upgrading two friends’ computers to Windows 7 (a Dell Inspiron 1525 and an Inspiron 1420 for those interested in boring minutiae). I’m using a flash drive as the installation media, thanks to this tool. There are a few big benefits from using flash instead of a DVD to perform the installation, and since every PC I’ve come across new enough for Windows 7 supports booting via USB, there really aren’t any downsides.

1. My flash drive has a read speed of 30 MB/s, faster than even a 20X DVD-ROM drive (every laptop I’ve come across reads DVDs at 8x). That’s at the edge of the disc. So the installation goes much more quickly.
2. I can add a folder to the flash drive with applications that I want to install, post-Windows-installation. There’s nothing special about this, other than reducing the need to search for downloads on the new computer and/or use a flash drive to move them over anyway.
3. I don’t have to use up a DVD, and copying the install files to flash tends to be faster than copying them to DVD (see point #1…my flash drive writes at 20 MB/s, while my DVD burner writes at 8x).

I’m getting a little off-track here, but this is actually quite useful: a list of ISO images for the various versions of Windows 7. The downloads are from Microsoft, so they’re pretty fast (I’m pulling down one at 2.2 MB/s, give or take, thanks to DownThemAll). They also include the option to grab Service Pack 1, versus the old RTM ISOs that I had stored on my computer. Which is handy since that decreases the number of updates that need to be applied post-install significantly.

I’m typing this post from my Cr-48. You know, the prototype Chromebook that Google was handing out a year and change ago? Well, this one’s different. It’s running Windows 8.

I’ll be posting over the next few days gems of wisdom (or something like that) that may make people’s experiences getting their Cr-48s up and running with WIndows 8 easier (all three of you).

For starters, take a look at this and this. Come back in less than 24 hours for the next tip: how to install your apps.

Today I installed Windows 8 (32-bit) into a VirtualBox VM. The process, once I figured out which settings to use, wasn’t all that difficult. I was even able to get 3D graphics (e.g. the Aero UI) to work. Here are a few things that may make things easier if you want to set up something similar:

1. I gave Win8 a 25GB partition. Really, 15GB or so should be fine, though with VBox’s dynamic disk images it doesn’t matter much either way. The Windows 8 install clocks in under 8GB for the 32-bit version (the one with a roughly 2.5GB ISO).
2. I gave Win8 1.5GB of memory. The operating system seemed to be more CPU limited than anything else though, on my four-year-old iMac with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM. Or I may just have been swapping too much, with everything I had running on my host OS (Mac OS X 10.7.3). So my guess is that pushing RAM back down to 1GB wouldn’t hurt.
3. Using VirtualBox’s default settings, Windows 8 will probably hang on installing. To fix this, go to the VM settings, then set the SATA controller to use the host I/O cache under Storage. If you want 3D graphics, up the video memory there to 128MB (just to be safe; the system should be able to run on less) and turn on 3D Acceleration (and, heck, 2D Video Acceleration while you’re at it) under Display in the VM settings.
4. VirtualBox Guest Additions works perfectly under Windows 8 now (I’m using VirtualBox 4.1.8). If you tell the installer to use the experimental Direct3D driver you won’t have to reboot into Safe Mode to install it. Also, while network connectivity, audio and 3D graphics all work without installing Guest Additions, the Additions do allow automatic display resizing, which is a big plus in my book.

Frontier Airlines today announced that they’ll be adding some more routes to, among other places, Denver. A few months from now, this means they’ll be serving 67 destinations from the airport, though this will drop as places like San Antonio, Aspen and Rockford are discontinued.

This announcement piqued my curiosity (and caused me to waste a fair amount of time as a result): how many destinations dues United, Denver’s legacy hub carrier, serve out of the airport? 125, as it turns out. Denver’s third hub carrier, Southwest, will be serving 55 destinations soon, if you count the handful run under its subsidiary Airtran.

So what exactly are the destinations served from Denver by United? I put together a list based on Wikipedia, removing duplicates where multiple carriers (regional plus mainline or multiple regionals) served the same airport. Here’s what I got:

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I’m building an admin interface for this ”on the side.” One of the things I want in the project is a REST-style URL structure (e.g. /people/123 rather than /people.php?id=123). I also wanted all requests to be handled by one file, which would then divvy things up to other scripts/functions as needed. So I wanted a kind of micro-framework, but wanted to build it myself.

So I did.

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I use a Mac as my main workstation. One of the annoying things about “stock” Quick Look (the handy space-bar-to-preview extension of the OS’s file manager, Finder) is that it won’t magically “pick up” the various programming language file types (e.g. YAML, Behat features) that I use regularly.

Fortunately, there is a solution. I’d recommend making a duplicate of TextEdit and working on that though; the hack works just as well that way and, more importantly, I now have one copy of TextEdit that doesn’t crash on ope (the one with a non-edited plist).

Despite the fact that I’m a Packers fan by association, I rooted for the non-Patriots (aka the Giants in this case) this afternoon/evening. Glad they won.

In other news, the ads this year were decidedly less spectacular than usual. To be clear, the Doritos ads were fine, as was E-Trade. The Best Buy ad was a nice nerd moment for me, but it was otherwise unspectacular. The Avengers will be a cool movie when it comes out, but I was going to watch it whether or not they showed a Superbowl ad. GoDaddy? ‘nuff said…actually, let me say this straight up: they market themselves as a soft-core porn company that also sells web services. Or something like that. Seriously, guys? Grow up.

Like last year, Chrysler did a two-minute ad. Unlike last year, Clint Eastwood was the voice actor. The message: “Go buy a Chrysler product because…America. And Detroit.” The post-apocalypse Chevy ad was more entertaining, probably because they included references to both Zombieland (Twinkies) and I Am Legend (everything else, other than the brand of vehicle).

One definite sore spot for me was the streaming system, which is how I watched the game. The machine streaming never seemed to be able to get anywhere close to a real-time feed, though my Kindle Fire seemed not to have an issue. At the beginning of the game, the stream was unreliable. Once it got reliable the ads, a small subset of those shown on TV plus a few low-quality extra ones, got very annoying, very quickly. Next time I hope that CBS will mirror TV ads in the online stream…and show the halftime show there.

One last thing: I have the feeling that Chevrolet got a lot of views for the money that they spent on web video ad placement during the streaming Superbowl. Too bad people got so sick of the same old ad that the intended effect (people being encouraged to buy Chevy) won’t really happen.

On the topic of flights (and acknowledging that I didn’t post anything yesterday), let’s see if I can list all the flights/airlines/aircraft types/airports I traversed in 2011. Should be fun, since if I stayed on one airline for the entire year I’d probably have low-tier elite status, and if I strung together the miles that I flew, I could go around the world (albeit just once).

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I fly Southwest Airlines a fair amount, thanks to their dollars-based reward program that works out quite well for holders of its credit card. So I’m used to trekking out to Concourse C of Denver International Airport, waiting by numbered posts to board and picking my seat once I get on the plane rather than well before. One thing I’ve noticed while flying them is they have just a tad more leg room than you’d find on normal seating on another airline…32 inches to be exact, versus 31.

That’s going to change soon.

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