Skype: 100 million downloads and still counting

Clearly. I’m not the only one sold on Skype. Skype popularity soars

My podcast setup

Several people have asked for a diagram of my podcasting setup. You can click on the sketch at left to see it.
The way I record Skype calls and get around the echo problem is to set Skype to send audio to my Powerbook system instead of the USB headphone.
That audio goes into a mixer.
The Skype caller hears me speaking through the USB microphone but I’m also speaking into my Shure mic, which plugs into the mixer. Output from the mixer - the Skype caller and my Shure audio - then plugs into my Mac G5, which records it using Audible software.
I monitor it all on a pair of earphones connected to the mixer.
Works for me.
I’ll be posting another podcast later this weekend.

Comcast explains outages

Comcast has now explained the cause behind three nights of server problems that have slowed the system over the past week or so. Blame it on centralization of its servers.
Several months ago, two DNS name server clusters - one in New Jersey, the other outside Denver - replaced the network of regional name servers Comcast used to run. For still unknown reasons, those two national server clusters started choking last week.
The president of Comcast’s Midwest Division tells me he thinks they’ve solved the problem by switching back to regional servers until the centralized servers can be debugged. At any rate, last night seems to have been a normal Comcast night. MIKE WENDLAND: Comcast has new Internet troubles

New beta Yahoo! News site

Yahoo! has a newly redesigned news site. The beta is up for a public look-see. Yahoo! News Home Page

Skype podcast correspondents sought

If you use Skype and have a lot to say about technology, I’m looking for volunteer correspondents I can interview live via computer-to-computer Skype interviews for our podcast shows. Contact me at mwpodcast AT gmail.com and tell me the areas you’d like to talk about such as games, hardware, software, Macs, the Net, whatever. I want to give my podcasts the audio equivalent of the comments feature on this blog. Skype gives us a neat way to do so.

Comcast seems stablized

>From my e-mail and postings across the Net, it looks like Comcast’s service problems have resolved today. We’ll see what tonight brings.

The Web and big media

Here’s another big media guy who has realized the huge number of readers and viewers who have turned to the Web as their primary news sources. Newspapers Must Embrace Internet

Google plans to distribute videos

Is there no area where Google fears to tread?
Google is preparing a video distribution platform that provides a “complete ecosystem of services for content producers, publishers and end-users.” Google Preps Video Distribution Service

Comcast lagging another night

If you access the Net through Comcast, you probably won’t be able to read this post tonight. Once agan, Comcast’s DNS name servers are barely working, slowing access to a crawl. It’s the seond night in a row and the third time in a week the service has experienced unspecified “server problems.”
The company is very tightlipped about exactly what’s wrong, how extensive it is and when it will be back to normal - reminiscent of the public relations fiasco of a couple years ago when it minimized widespread outages and customer complaints by pretending that all its problems were being blown out of proportion.
As Comcast stalls and chokes yet another night, users are taking matters into their own hands with workarounds like the ones suggested here.
Anyway, looks like another frustrating night for Comcast customers in many places of the country.Comcast DNS Servers Lagging AGAIN

Comcast statement on DNS outage problems

A statement from a Comcast tech support spokesman has been posted on the Comcast connections help forum.
You need to be a Comcast subscriber to log onto the forums.
The statement acknowledges the outage issues of last week and last night and blames them on some sort of still unknown “server error.” It advises people to reset the configuration workarounds that were allowing some tech savy people to get around the problem by essentially piggybacking on service from other Internet providers.
The post, from a guy named Jason who moderates the forum for Comcast, notes “our engineers are investigating the root causes of this issue in order to prevent future occurrences” and says “our engineers will be able to use these findings to build preventative measures for these types of outages.”
For whatever it’s worth, my service has been working fine all day and was working when I logged on this morning. It was severely crippled for several hours last night.
Comcast subscribers are reacting to the statement with lots of criticism that telehone tech support seems clueless when they call to complain and that the company is too secretive about it’s outages.

Comcast problems

It’s Comcast deja vu, with howls of complaints about recent service disruptions and slowdowns clogging the broadband chatrooms and my e-mail inbox.
I experienced barely-functioning broadband one night last week and again last night and the boards at Broadband Reports indicate problems more widespread than Michigan.
Some users are sharing some workarounds to the sropped or stalled service.
I’ve asked Comcast folks for an explanation and will report it here but Matt Rousch’s Great Lakes IT Report this morning quotes a company spokesman as saying last night “there were some server-based issues, but we aren’t getting more specific than that.”
Reader Chuck Reti e-mailed me to say:

“Last Thursday 4/7 service was unavailable here in Michigan, and in Colorado, New England, California to name just a few I saw complaining on the forums. Restoration here was not until nearly 4am. Tonight 4/12 service dropped sometime before 9:30p and is still out two hours later. It appears that their Domain Name Server(s) system is failing spectacularly.”

All I know is too many of us work from home these days and broadband service is essential. If this was electricity that was out or barely operating, there would be little tolerance for a “we’re not going to be more specific than that” statement from the provider.

Tiger to be unleashed

Apple today announced that Mac OS? X version 10.4 ?Tiger? will go on sale Friday, April 29, beginning at 6:00 p.m.?during special events at Apple?s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Tiger has more than 200 new features and innovations including Spotlight, a revolutionary desktop search technology that lets users instantly find anything stored on their Mac, including documents, emails, contacts and images; and Dashboard, a new way to instantly access important information like weather forecasts and stock quotes, using a dazzling new class of applications called widgets.
?Mac OS X Tiger is the most innovative and secure desktop operating system ever created,? said Steve Jobs, Apple?s CEO. ?Tiger?s groundbreaking new features like Spotlight and Dashboard will change the way people use their computers, and drive our competitors nuts trying to copy them.?Here comes Tiger.

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