Monthly Archives: March 2011

Apple Pulls ‘Gay-Cure’ App Following Controversy

Apple has removed a controversial iPhone app from its app store by a religious group determined to “cure” homosexuality, but only after 146,000 outraged people signed a petition.

I’ve followed many stories about people and companies that have had various problems getting their app published to the Apple online store.  I was honestly surprised that in this day and age, from a company as prominent as Apple, that is so protective of their online store, would allow something like this to be promoted.  I thought we were past this sort of thing at this level.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/23/apple-pulls-gay-cure-app-following-controversy/

The Tourist (2010)

The Tourist is a light hearted spy action movie, with a weak plot and mediocre action scenes.  Overall it’s a well made commercial movie.  But the only thing that carries it through is the charisma of Jolie and Depp, as well the European scenery.  It’s reasonably entertaining, but you’re left thinking you expected better.

7/10

Love and Other Drugs (2010)

It has romance, comedy and even some drama.  This is a storey about love, learning and life, and two people discovering these things together.

Some people will feel this movie more than others.  The rest of you will simply find it entertaining.

9/10

Faster (2010)

Dwayne plays an ex-con getting revenge against other criminals that killed his brother.  There’s also a hot but slightly mentally disturbed hitman involved in this plot.

That’s the whole movie.  Not in a nutshell, that’s as deep as it gets.  It’s blah.  Has some okay action.  But it’s dull, even though it’s somewhat graphic and violent, but overall it’s simply blah.

5/10

Google Giving Final Death Blow to Gizmo5

The few of us that are left (I assume not many) as paying customers on Gizmo5, received this email from Google…I mean Gizmo5…in the past day.  They are finally killing it off entirely, in my opinion.  I think Gizmo5 was the slickest VoIP provider around.  Easy to set up, add to voip phones, Asterisk servers, and software clients.  

After Google bought the company, they gave us customers continued access, but didn’t allow us to add extra lines, but they did offer some of the services there after for free.  No new customers were allowed to sign up after that point.  

I think we were all expecting an email at some point with a dead line to discontinue service.  And now it’s here.  Now I can enjoy moving my voip lines to another provider.  Not difficult, just time consuming and very annoying.

Goodbye Gizmo5.

 

From: support@gizmo5inc.com

Subject: Gizmo5 Important Update

Hello,

Gizmo5 is writing to let you know that we will no longer be providing service starting on April 3, 2011. A week from today, March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to add credit to your account.

Although the standalone Gizmo5 client will no longer be available, we have since launched the ability to call phones from within Gmail at even more affordable rates.

If you purchased calling credit and have a balance remaining in your account, you can request a refund by logging in to http://my.gizmo5.com. If you are in the United States, you can instead choose to transfer your credit to a Google Voice account, so it can be used for calling from Google Voice or Gmail. If you don’t have a Google Voice account, please create one so that we can transfer your credit.

Unfortunately, we are not able to transfer your Gizmo5 call-in number to Google Voice. If you’d like to keep your Gizmo5 call-in number, we recommend that you check with your local carrier to determine what options are available to you.

Please request a call credit transfer or refund by April 3, 2011. If you don’t request a call credit transfer or refund by this date, we will automatically refund your remaining call credit via the payment method you originally used to purchase the credit. Note that if you paid via Moneybookers or if the credit card on file has expired, we will not be able to automatically refund your unused credit, so please log in to initiate the refund process.

Thank you,

The Gizmo5 Team

 

You have received this mandatory service announcement email to update you about important changes to your Gizmo5 account.

 

 

Android SIP Call Contact Management is Poor

Google added native SIP calling to it’s latest release of Android 2.3.x, also known as Gingerbread.  The SIP calling works fine and is easy to set up.  However, it appears to be poorly thought out and implimented when it comes to contact management.

They have added a new field they call “Internet Call” to the Contacts app on Android.  They’ve also added this field to the contacts in GMail.  This is where you can add SIP numbers, for example “SIP:xxxxx@domain.com”.

On Android 2.3.3 in the phone app contacts, you can only add one entry.  That’s all they allow.  In a GMail contact entry, you can add multiple “Internet Call” fields.  You can then see them on the Android 2.3.3 phone app, and you can delete the extra fields, but you still can not add any more than what you see.

So we can add a single entry on the phone, we can add multiple entries in GMail, but there appears to be no other way to get that data into the phone, or get it out later.  I have yet to find a way to get Android 2.3.3 to import this field in a vCard.  And in GMail it is not included in a vCard or CSV export.

Based on my extensive personal research on Google’s implimentation of vCard 3.0 on Android, it’s my personal opinion that Google’s vCard functionality falls short of standards base and required full functionality to interact with Android contact data through vCards.  The “Import/Export” feature in Android is a mix of vCard 2.1 and 3.0, and possibly some personal preferences of the person or people that wrote the code.  It certainly appears to not follow the RFC standard.  It will only export a subset of the contact info in vCard 2.1.  And when importing you must design your vCard data not to the exact and complete RFC, but tweak it to allow for it’s expected design since it still expects some data in vCard 2.1 format.  And now we can add the lack of “Internet Call” field to that list.

There are various ways of implimenting SIP call fields in vCard 3.0, including the RFC4770, plus various forms of extended “types” such as “X-SIP:…”.

It will be a while before the average person, or even average geek will even notice the “Internet Call” shortcomings in Gingerbread.  And maybe only developers and tech geeks will care.  But I’m still disappointed in how slowing the contact management is evolving in Android.  To me it feels like a total after thought.  But what do I know, it’s only a phone operating system, who needs a great contact manager in a phone OS anyway?  Plus Google isn’t that big a company, we shouldn’t blame them for pushing stuff out that maybe isn’t complete or consistent.