Recently Linode started a wave of upgrades:

1. 20% increase in storage (December 2012)
2. Network upgrade that included upgrading the transfer allowance (March 2013)
3. Host node upgrades running newer Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs + 8 cores per VPS (March 2013)
4. RAM doubled on all plans (April 2013)

After reading about the RAM upgrade and simply had to get my VPS running with all of the above (out of the above my VPS I was only taking advantage of the network upgrade). I made the difficult decision to sacrifice my 319 days of uptime …

I started off with the disk upgrade which took my VPS offline for a few minutes while I resized the HDD and restarted the Linode. Then I decided to go through the migration to the new host nodes running the newer processors (aka 8 cores + double RAM).

15 minutes later, my VPS is safely back up, running on new hardware, with more RAM, disk space and bandwidth !

I wonder what else Linode have under their sleeves…?

I have decided to start off the series with the things that I do not like with Windows Phone 8, this also includes what I believe to be bugs. Do note that I have come from an Android phone before jumping ship and getting myself a Windows Phone phone .

Audio Settings

I’m not sure why Microsoft made the sound settings the way it is. Right now, there is only 1 volume control for everything: ringing, notifications and any other audio you may think of. So if you are listening to your music but have the volume toned down, your ringtone will also be toned down.

I hope Microsoft adds some flexibility in audio controls in the upcoming updates.

Wi-Fi

Whether or not you are on a data plan, sometimes Wi-Fi is the best (and cheapest) connection you have just about anywhere you go. Not to mention that Wi-Fi will also consume less power than having your 3G on in an area with less than optimal coverage.

I sometimes tend to keep Wi-Fi on when I am in someplace with great Wi-Fi such as home. For some reason, Windows Phone 8 does not like to keep the Wi-Fi connection running and will switch to your data connection. Researching online, it seems like the disconnect from Wi-Fi occurs when the phone goes to the lock screen. Thankfully Microsoft has acknowledged this issue and a fix is coming soon according to that article (dated November, before the Portico update).

You also have the tethering issue, but that is not exactly an issue with Windows Phone 8 but most likely Windows 8. I managed to fix this.

Windows Phone 8 Store

Compared to Android and even iOS, the Windows Phone store is still limited, at least in my opinion.  Announcements say otherwise. I don’t need many apps, but I have noticed that popular apps found free on the other platforms are in their paid form in the Windows Phone store (sometimes quite pricey!). You may also not find useful apps such as a SIP client which has been around in the other platforms for some time.

There is also a lack in apps that allows you to manipulate with the hardware of your phone. For example, you have no apps that can disable the audio and vibrate feature of your phone during a certain time range, with the current SDK it is impossible (and this will most likely not change for “security” reasons).

Depending on the region you select in your phone’s settings, the market will reflect based on that. For example, I selected Bahrain, but the official Twitter app is not available. Switch to the US and I was able to download it. Also likely region related, you cannot install apps directly from the Windows Phone store, you need to visit your “region’s” store and see if it can be pushed to your phone. This does have a big disadvantage, the language of the website changes to the region’s language. For example, the Bahrain store will be in Arabic, making it useless for non-Arabic readers.

To add even more frustration, push installation do not always work. Sometime after hitting the install link on your browser, it will say that the app has been installed but you can’t find it anywhere in your phone! And if the push install fails due to it being unable to reach your phone, the store will send a link to the app to the email you registered (which is good if you have that email account setup on your phone).

These are current gripes I have with Windows Phone 8, luckily I haven’t been hit with the more serious bugs some people are experiencing like random reboots. However, I’ve only had my phone (a Nokia Lumia 920) for a few weeks, time will tell what else I may find.

The next post will be more positive, the good side of Windows Phone 8.

Just to give a bit of an introduction. I have recently (only a couple of weeks) moved away from the openness and flexible mobile platform, Android, to a (hopefully) more stable and predictable OS, Windows Phone 8. I decided to go all out and got myself the hyped Nokia Lumia 920.

Given that I have been using Android since Froyo (2.2), rooted my phone, installed non-stock ROMs (like AOKP), bricked it once and developed a few Android apps (published and unpublished), I am definitely going to be biased in my views of Windows Phone. Or at least for now.

Hope you enjoy the series of posts coming up ! And of course, Happy New Year!

I went for the very popular Nokia Lumia 920 (sure it is bulky compared to the HTC 8x, but it has a more solid build) and to be honest I’m not missing much compared to Android (email + WhatsApp + GPS navigation are the apps I use the most).

One of the great things about smartphones these days is the ability to tether (for those unfamiliar with the term: share your phone’s data with other devices over WiFi or sometimes even USB). I tried to tether my Windows Phone 8 to my Windows 8 Pro laptop and unfortunately I kept getting “Limited Access”. I tried just about everything from switching DNS to reinstalling drivers and I can’t remember what else.

I was frustrated, I thought my phone was broken somehow. A search online did not help much since people were either using phones with providers that “crippled” the tethering feature or had it removed completely. I bought my phone from the Nokia dealer in Bahrain (Intercol) and know for a fact that is supposed to be unlocked.

Then it hit me, in my frustration I never tried tethering to my Windows 7 desktop, my Android phone or even my PS Vita. Surprisingly they had no problem accessing the Internet, something was wrong with Windows 8. I attempted to tether to my Windows 8 work laptop and bam, limited access… Windows 8 was definitely the culprit.

After days of trying I finally found the solution, although I can’t explain the reason why it works, it just works! What you need to do in Windows 8 is enable FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards), just follow these steps:

1. Right click on your tethered WiFi connection (which is currently showing “Limited Access”) and open up “View connection properties”.

2. Go to the “Security” tab and click on “Advanced Settings”.

3. Tick the “Enable FIPS” box (its the only box there). Hit the OKs.

4. If the connection still shows “Limited Access” just disconnect and reconnect. It should have Internet access now.

Hope this clears your tethering frustrations !

Yes, that is a reply to my question 7 SECONDS after I opened the ticket! You don't even find canned responses that quick! Oh and my Linode VPS was back up and running when I got the reply. So not only was it a response, it was also a resolution!

One of many reasons I recommend Linode if you are ever looking for a VERY reliable VPS (they use Xen).

This is not the first time I write about them: here is a review I wrote about them and another about their uptime. I wonder if they're better than Rackspace's Fanatical Support? Wouldn't be surprised, they definitely beat Liquid Web's Heroic Support!

There were several attempts for the Artificial Intelligence projects  that have failed. However, in the early 1980’s, Artificial Intelligence research was revived. By 1985, the market for A1 had soared into billions of dollars. However, in 1987, it collapsed once again.

Artificial Intelligence’s greatest success was in the 1990s. This is where A1 was usedfor data mining, medical diagnosis and many other areas throughout the technology industry. On May 1997, the first computer chess playing system named Deep Blue, beat reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. In 2005, a Stanford robot won the DARPA Urban Challenge.

As time passes on, research on A1 has changed over time. Today, A1 is back and is in receipt of serious interest from NASA. This goes with Google, as well. The idea of creating smart machines with human or greater intelligence is back on track once more. Now, they use A1 to automate and replace some human activities and functions with computer driven machines. These machines were designed to see and hear, respond to questions and instructions, and even solve problems on their own. This shift would soon lead to the huge acceleration in technological enhancement of different kinds.

In 2007, computers were designed to be adept at detecting human faces and recognizing them from different views. These were also designed for recognizing people or simulate as they age or grow hair or beards. These computers could also form geometric models of objects and determine a 3D structure of a scene.

Today, there are several ongoing projects. One of which is Cyc. Cyc is 22 year old project, aimed at generating knowledge and acquiring common sense based on symbolic reasoning.  This has accumulated knowledge to be able to learn new things on its own just like a human being. Cyc is also designed to communicate with people via Internet to get new knowledge from them. There were also several ongoing projects, aimed at creating a full featured thinking machine that could perform human functions.

For the future, they will continue to improve on different fields such as speech recognition until it reaches human level. Thus, making computers and machines able to communicate with humans. They intend to recreate parts of the human body such as the brain in silicon. This was already experimented on rats. There were two major projects that aimed for human brain simulation. These two projects were CCortex and IBM Blue Brain. They also aim to have robots to take over human jobs and functions.

This post is written by John Lewis and he works at PriceCollate as a writer. You can visit pricecollate to find and compare various type of ballet flats for women at great prices.

My first ever webmail account was a Hotmail account (I believe I signed up back in 1998). I then went through several other providers before settling with Gmail. Why? Hotmail's SPAM filtering is really bad compared to Gmail, the URL structure isn't bookmark friendly (yes you can bookmark a Gmail conversation) and the interface was simply horrible. However, it looks like Hotmail may just be giving Google a run for their money with their new interface: Outlook.com

As the name suggests, the new web interface shares the same new as Microsoft's e-mail client Outlook. The Outlook web interface is not the new face of Hotmail and it has come with several new features (clean look, Twitter and Facebook integration, office and no ads).

I was quite surprised to see how CLEAN the Metro interface looked! Compared to the old interface, there is really no comparison. Almost like a breath of fresh air. It's even much cleaner than Gmail's interface.

Composing e-mails is more comfortable as well. I really liked the clear separation between the sections where you add recipients, compose your message and either send, save or cancel your message. This was also the first time I bothered trying out a smiley :-p!

Similarly to Gmail, the new Outlook interface also has that floating toolbar (reply, delete, junk, move etc…) that follows as you scroll through your email.

Until now, Outlook has been just another e-mail interface. This is where it is truly different: it allows you to connect to your other online accounts. This connection will also apply if you have linked Windows 8 to your Microsoft account. At the moment I checked I had Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Flickr and Google. I have seen other people also have YouTube as an account integration option.

If for some reason you do not like your Hotmail account dressed up in the Outlook interface, you can simply revert back to the old interface by clicking on the settings (the wrench). I see no reason why someone would want to go back to the old interface though (I very, very rarely use Hotmail anyway)!

Is e-mail dead, definitely not in Microsoft's opinion since they are providing more than just e-mail thanks to allowing integration with other accounts you use around the web. Would I start using Hotmail again? Not in the near future, my Gmail account is my main account and change is something difficult . I might consider it if Microsoft really improved their SPAM filtering algorithms which is one area that hasn't changed in my opinion.

Long live e-mail!

For those of you who don't know Connectify: they created the software that allows you to share your connection (Wifi, LAN, 3G you name it) to others using WiFi. Basically the Connectify software turns your PC into a router! Great for extending your home's WiFi network, or sharing that expensive hotel Internet access to your other devices.

Connectify have recently started a new project, this thing called Dispatch. According to them, Dispatch will allow you to "use all of your available Internet connections at once to maximize speed and reliability". Let's use an example and apply it to what Dispatch aims to do. At home I currently have a WiFi connection to ISP 1 (at 1 Mbps), LAN to ISP 2 (2 Mbps) and a 3G dongle (up to 42 Mbps). Dispatch will allow me to combine all these connection into a single super connection with the speed combined! So theoretically my Internet pipe using Dispatch could reach 45 Mbps.

The idea is not new, this is sort of what channel bonding (common in DSL) and link aggregation does anyway (or at least I think). However, they are not easy to configure, may or may not work with certain hardware and a ton of other variables that simply makes it not for the layman PC user. Dispatch hoped to make it a breeze.

Connectify are currently running a Kickstarter project to gather funds ($50,000) to develop Dispatch. Don't worry, if you contribute you get some goodies depending on how much you pledge, from a Connectify license to working with the design team making your own skin .

I sure am interested in trying out Dispatch when it comes, especially when I'm downtown!