Monthly Archive for February, 2006

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Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress 2.0

Published on February 26, 2006 in Wordpress. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ever since I saw the new ‘import from Blogger’ functionality in Wordpress 2.0, I’ve known I would eventually migrate my main blog. Blogger is a great way to start blogging , but I want categories, easy template updating (without republish) and all the Wordpress plug-in sweetness. As a dress rehearsal, I migrated my Dutch poetry blog first: Zo helpt Poezie ….

START SITUATION

  • The site was managed with Blogger but published via FTP on one of my own domains. Because my old hosting system did not support domain mapping while serving multiple domains, I had to publish each domain in a subfolder. All blog’s files were stored under www.samoera.com/poezie/.
  • The individual posts (one poem per post) were saved as /poezie/[YEAR]/[MONTH]/[TITLE].html (e.g. /poezie/2004/04/02/kwijt-bart-moeyaert.html). I always used “[POEM TITLE] ([POEM AUTHOR])” as title for a post. Since Blogger removes special characters, this means that the file name typically ends with the author’s last name (something I will try to use later).
  • The monthly archives were saved as /poezie/[YEAR]_[MONTH]_01_gedichten.html (e.g. /poezie/2006_02_01_gedichten.html).

STEP 1: NEW HOSTING

I have taken an account with Bluehost.com. For $6.95 they offer 10GB storage, 250GB bandwidth and the excellent CPanel/Fantastico combo to easily configure sites, install software and manage your DNS.
My Bluehost hosting is on www.smoothouse.com. I use it already for stuff like the podcast feed validator and other small Smoothouse development projects.
Another option is Dreamhost.com: $7,99 per month, 20GB storage, 1TB bandwidth(!) but a less handy management panel. Don’t pay more than this.

STEP 2: SET UP WORDPRESS

Setting up Wordpress with Bluehost is quite easy: you go to the Fantastico page, select Wordpress, decide on a subfolder name (in my case: “poezie”), click “Install” and all the rest is automatic. After this, the blog is installed on -in my case- www.smoothouse.com/poezie. Later I will have to map the poetry site to this folder (without the /poezie folder showing)
Even if you don’t have the Fantastico wizard, Wordpress is one of the easiest programs to install. Then take one of the standard templates

STEP 3: IMPORT FROM BLOGGER

On the new blog, go to the /wp-admin/import.php page, and give you Blogger username/password. Then select the Blogger Blog you want to import and then let the import wizard run. It will import ALL POSTS and ALL COMMENTS! This is friggin’ awesome! It might take 5-10 minutes if you have a large blog.

STEP 4: MOVE ARCHIVE

Now download your full archive (via FTP with e.g. FileZilla) to your local drive and upload them to where they should be after you moved the domain. In my case: I uploaded them to www.smoothouse.com/poezie/poezie which will be mapped to www.samoera.com/poezie/ once the DNS transfer is done.
The reason for this: all your posts will have new URLs and you don’t want people who find your old URLs in Google and click on them to get a “Error 404 not found” page. So you start by copying them to the new hosting server. We will do some more fancy redirect stuff later.

STEP 5: DNS UPDATE

Now comes the tricky stuff: you want your domain name to point to the new host. So you edit the A or CNAME record for the domain name. This will take somewhere between 1 and 24 hours to propagate.
In my case (Bluehost) this also meant I had to transfer DNS management for all subdomains to Bluehost (i.e. change the SOA records). Bluehost requires you to this because the whole DNS management is linked to the Fantastico wizards. In this case it just meant that it took a while longer. I then mapped the www.samoera.com domain to map to the same /poezie folder I just created.
Once that the transfer is done, all your URLs should continue to work (since you took care of that in step 4)!

STEP 6: CHANGE CONFIGURATION

Change Wordpress root path to www.samoera.com instead of www.smoothouse.com/poezie/ (Wordpress will adapt all links on the blog pages). I removed the index.html from archive root (www.samoera.com/poezie) because a lot of sites link to it and replaced it by a index.php that redirects to www.samoera.com.
OPTIONAL: you can play with Apache Redirect/Rewrite rules to take every visitor to one of the old URLs automatically to the new URL. What I tried was:

### for the archives: easy to do!
RedirectMatch permanent /poezie/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])_([0-9][0-9])_01_.*html$ http://www.samoera.com/$1/$2/
### for the post pages: this would have worked if Apache didn't have a bug
#RedirectMatch permanent /poezie/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/.*-([a-z]*)\.html$ http://www.samoera.com/$1/$2/?s=$3
I tried to use the fact that the author’s last name (a quite ‘unique’ word) was the last word before the .html to construct queries like: www.samoera.com/2006/01/?s=tellegen (which shows all posts from Feb 2006 with the string ‘tellegen’ in the text – which almost always translates into 1 post). However, due to a bug in Apache (the ‘?’ before the querystring is always translated into %3f and this results in invalid URLs) I haven’t found the right way to do it yet. I could have used
RedirectMatch permanent /poezie/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/.*html$ http://www.samoera.com/$1/$2/ but this maps onto a whole month – or up to 10 poems. Maybe I’ll find some other trick.

STEP 7: EXTERNAL STUFF

Change your Feedburner source to the new URL. Everyone that’s subscribed stays subscribed. Ain’t that neat? You don’t have a Feedburner feed? What, you only had Blogger Atom feed? Shame on you. Go get one!

The Next German Top Model will be thin

Published on February 21, 2006 in media. 2 Comments

The ‘top model’ Heidi Klum presents a TV show: Germany’s Next Top Model, basically a contest for a bunch of girls who want to become a top model (date actors, eat carrots, spend hours getting your hair done, dress lightly and get paid a whole lot of money while doing that). Recently one of the candidates was dismissed and the reasons were somewhat controversial:
Irina

Irina’s misfortune was her height-weight ratio — she weighed 52 kilograms (114.5 pounds) and was 1.76 meters (5 feet 9 inches) tall. With that kind of body, Irina, 19, was used to being adoringly ogled, but on supermodel Heidi Klum’s television show “Germany’s Next Top-Model” her body became her downfall. “Too fat,” was the verdict handed down by the show’s jury. The svelte Irina was sent home.
Der Spiegel

The poor thing has a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 16.8, which places her under the 5th percentile for her age. In theory, she could very well be an anorexic.

One wonders: do only extremely thin/skinny girls get a chance at becoming a top model? “Germany’s Next Top Model” (Prosieben) actually publishes dimensions and measurements for all girls. Which means that, if one were to throw those into a spreadsheet, one could make some graphs of that, couldn’t one? And so it happened that that was exactly what I did. Here are some results:

BMI (BODY MASS INDEX)

50% anorexic
The average BMI is 17,6. Granted, there are some 16-years olds amongst them (younger girls typically have smaller BMIs – cf BMI percentile for girls (PDF)) but more than half would be considered a candidate for anorexia by a US nutrition specialist (see remark). The lowest BMI was Katrin (23y, 171cm, 46kg) with 15,7 and the highest Ramona (17y, 173cm, 61kg) with 20,4. Both didn’t make it to the final selection. Heidi Klum herself is also a small eater: 17,2.
REMARK: the indicator used is: below the 5th percentile in that age group. It indicates a risk for anorexia. Keep in mind that “anorexia nervosa => exceptionally thin” does not mean “exceptionally thin => anorexia nervosa” (classical ‘non-sequitur‘)). The only percentile numbers I found are for the US population, but remember that the average weight in the States (27% overweight) is significantly higher than Germany (19%) or Belgium (12% overweight). So a woman with a BMI of 18 in the US can be considered ‘exceptionally thin’, while the same weight/height ratio in Belgium is not that exceptional. I have several female friends with a BMI of 18 or lower, and I can assure you they do not have any eating disorder.

CURVES

Curves vs BMI
OK, bear with me for a moment. I also had the bust/waist/hips measurements. But I wanted a single number instead of 3. So I did the following: there is this 90-60-90 ideal that men seem to prefer (the ‘average man’ presumably, my hands are too small). Think “Monica Belluci” (perfect 100%)! Now calm your breathing and read on. So I came up with a CURVE (or ‘wasp‘) coefficient that scores 100% for that mythical 90-60-90 and that grows the more wasp-like the figure is (waist/[[hip+bust]/2] is smaller) and the more symmetric it is (hip/bust is 1). To get a feeling for it: the minimal score is 76% for Jennifer (80-66-91) and the maximum score is 97% for Missy (90-62-90). Heidi Klum scores an average 93% (88-61-86). There is of course a correlation between BMI and CURVE. It’s kinda hard to be a 90-60-90 and be exceptionally thin. Something’s gotta give.

CONCLUSIONS

  • BMI: is not the defining factor for making it in a “Top Model” kind of show (in the sense of: the lower the better). What a relief! Although, a look at the chart shows that having an ‘unusual’ BMI does not help: all candidates with a BMI below 17 or above 18 are no longer in the running.
  • CURVE: Monica Belluci would have a hard time here. The least curvy girl (76% Jennifer, mainly because of her err… less significant chest area) is still in there. All candidates with a CURVES coefficient above 93% are out.
  • QUALITY/QUANTITY: I am confident that, in order to win a contest like that, a lot of other qualities are more important than measurements (say: IQ, character, confidence, prettiness) but I limited myself here to an exercise in Excel statistics.
  • TOPIC: statistics and pretty women: I love it. Any related stuff I should dive in to? Actresses? European models compared to US models? Spanish vs German?

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Broadband in Brussels

Published on February 17, 2006 in Belgium, Brussel, bandwidth and internet. 2 Comments

(post seems to have disappeared when I migrated to Wordpress
I have what is proving to be an expensive habit: I’m subscribed to over 30 podcasts (including e.g. Diggnation at 300MB/week), I regularly download software to try out, I use BitTorrent on a regular basis, I buy stuff on iTunes. All that adds up to more than my allowance my ISP subscription gives me (20GB per month). Most of the months I pay an extra €8 per 10GB.

I’m a Coditel customer (cable provider in the part of Brussels where I live). I started out on ADSL until I got loads of technical problems and Belgacom/Skynet could not solve them. My current bandwidth is not bad (although not as fast as Telenet):

http://www.adslbox.be speed test results:
- Download speed : 4415 kbit/s or 552 kbyte/s
(in theory it should be 10.000 kbit/s)
- Upload speed : 233 kbit/s or 29 kbyte/s
Wed Feb 15 2006 at 20:59:42 UTC+0100

But now I want to know: do I have the best formula? So I collected some data. On vergelijking.be all the provider formulas are listed, but the list is not up-to-date. I collected all the latest numbers from the ISPs’ homepages. I got some real throughput statistics from adslbox.be and ispmonitor.be.

BROADBAND PRICES

Broadband in Belgium: sorted by price
The cheapest broadband one can get is Coditel LightClick: 22,90 € for 1 Mbps. The best price/speed you can get is Telenet ExpressnetTurbo (60€ for a theorethical 20Mbps and an actual throughput of about 11 Mbps). The one to avoid is Belgacom ADSL Light: 30 € for a meager 0,5 Mbps.

COST OF 50GB/MON

Now let’s see what happens if I would go to 50GB data transfer per month. Only 6 providers allow for this, either because their GB/mon allowance is big enough or because the price per extra GB is acceptable:
Broadband in Belgium: cost of 50GB/mon
Where I live, I cannot get BruTele or Chello, so the only options are Coditel (cable) and Dommel, RealDSL or Mobistar (ADSL).

GB/MON ALLOWANCE

Broandband in Belgium: GB/mon allowance
There are a 6 broadband subscriptions that allow unlimited download allowances: Dommel Netconnect Pro, BruTele @Home and @Turbo, RealDSL Basic and GeekDSL and Chello Extreme. The only options for me in Brussels are the 2 ADSL ones, of which the Dommel one is excessively expensive (€150/month).

CONCLUSION

For Brussels, Coditel is still a very good option (now if they could update that empty FAQ page that doesn’t seem to have been updated since the nineties). There is no point in switching from SpeedClick to MegaClick for the GB/mon only, but if the speed is really the double (in theory 20Mbps instead of 10Mbps) it might be a nice upgrade. I don’t need something like 200GB/month yet, but if I would, then RealDSL would be the best option.

If you live in Flanders and your main concern is speed, go Telenet ExpressNet Turbo. If you need loads of GB/month, go Chello Extreme (where possible) or RealDSL.

UPDATE
RealDSL does NOT accept any new subscriptions since October 2005, since there seem to be a capacity problem with its bandwidth provider Telenet. Luc and Cindy blogged about this earlier, so I have no excuse for my sloppy research. The only DSL provider with a unlimited bandwidth offer seems to be Dommel, but at an extreme high price. Their €33/50GB is however a good offer. Thanks for the update, Smetty!

The RIAA shoots itself in the foot again

Published on February 16, 2006 in copyright. 2 Comments

Image by FactoryJoe

Someone at the RIAA decided they hadn’t enough enemies yet. Why not start screwing with the iPod owners?

As part of the on-going DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA and other copyright industry associations submitted a filing that included this gem as part of their argument that space-shifting and format-shifting do not count as noninfringing uses, even when you are talking about making copies of your own CDs
(…)
For those who may not remember, here’s what Don Verrilli said to the Supreme Court last year:
“The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.”
from EFF via BoingBoing

It’s a struggle for survival: the RIAA sees their old business model disappear, has no clue how to adapt to that and reacts by throwing money at lawyers and lobbyists. The RIAA is like the USS Nimitz in a pond that is drying up and the only reaction they can think of is: “sue the sun”.

What is so special about this is that the music industry has something that most industries would die for: passionate consumers. It’s not as if we buy music because we ran out of them (like toilet paper) or because the old ones aren’t any good anymore (like newspapers). We have developed a taste, we have artists we love and others we hate, we know the names of people behind them, we’re interested in how they live their life. There are groupies, musical subcultures, music magazines, music sites and TV stations with nothing but music. It’s a product any CEO would sell his mother-in-law for. Yet, the only thing the ‘old’ record companies seem to do with that is make their customers passionately hostile.

Look, I dunno what planet you guys think you�re on and what legal system is going to end up supporting your stilted worldview, but it doesn�t even matter. Because you�re irrelevant. You�re meaningless. What you�re doing is like a slow train wreck euthanasia; we�re all watching you pen your own demise, over months and months of screwing your best customers. I mean�it�s so painfully clear to us! Why is this not obvious to you?
FactoryJoe

Let’s take another example of a company that has passionate customers: Apple. Would it have been wise of Apple to sell a computer and forbid people to install software on it that was not developed by Apple? What if Apple had built a music player that only played music in its proprietary AAC format? “Yes, we know this MP3 thing is kinda big and stuff, but we feel we have to protect you from yourself. Oh, you want to print stuff? That’s an extra 50 cents per page!”
On the contrary, Steve Jobs is the (only) one who is driving the entertainment industry forward. While record companies were still arguing about “how much can we charge them for each time they listen to a song and how can we control that”, iTunes set the standard: 1$ per song, $10 per album, no limits on listening. While the MPA was busy suing toddlers and grannies with BitTorrent, iTunes came up with a model for TV show distribution: 2$/episode – no bullshit. We can only hope health problems do not keep Steve from setting standards in movie distribution either (like: get rid of the DVD regions or use BitTorrent as distribution mechanism). The content is ready, the bandwidth is ready, the customer is ready, all we need now is someone who wants serve his customers the 21st century way.

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User-generated media is Intel’s wet dream

Published on February 14, 2006 in hardware. 0 Comments

Since the CISC processors were invented some decades ago, companies like Intel and AMD have tried to follow some form of Moore’s Law: double the number of transistors on a chip – or the corresponding CPU clock speed – every 2 years or 18 months (there’s more than 1 version of the law).

As it�s become harder for average mortals to see the benefits of faster clock speeds and greater CPU muscle, the guns of the great megahertz war have begun to go silent. In the computer business today, the market places greater value on factors other than processor power � on things like battery life and portability and not having your laptop burn a hole through your trousers. As computing devices keep getting smaller, such secondary characteristics will continue to grow in relative importance.
(from nicholasgcarr.com)

Even while sustaining that growth path has proven to be rather hard now (anyone ever seen a 4GHz processor?), they are still enhancing the horsepower by enlarging cache memory and using dual-core processors. The more power, the higher the price one can ask for.

Any sensible consumer would of course ask: how much power do I really need? If I’m just running Microsoft Office, browsing the web and reading my email, I don’t really need hyper-threading/dual-core 3GHz. For most people this was true. Until recently, the only people that really needed fast computers were:

  • Creative professionals: real-time audio/video editing, Photoshop on large images
  • Hard-core gamers: for running Quake, Counter-Strike or Half-Life on high resolutions
  • Research labs: to construct clusters for large calculations (fluid dynamics, drug simulation)

But that small customer base has grown a lot more as of recently: grassroots multimedia content creation has come to the rescue.
'More Power!' - Home Improvement
Now I need CPU power to rip my CDs to MP3 or my DVDs to DivX. I receive AVI files and need to convert them to an iPod video format. I record a podcast and encode it to 64 kbps before it’s ready for distribution. My kid makes a video with a web cam or mobile phone and it has to be edited with MovieMaker/iMovie and encoded to Quicktime before posting. For this, I need all the processor power I can get.

Audio and video encoding scales almost linearly with CPU speed. So that 3GHz processor can do the job 25% faster than a 2.4GHz. An extra core makes sure I can continue to work on my computer while it is encoding something. Video encoding with a Celeron/Sempron? Forget it, life’s too short. Again, the chip manufacturers and the computer vendors have a good reason to advise their customers to “take the fastest CPU you can afford” (comparison of old Centrino and new Centrino Duo: 80% to 145% faster for simultaneous MP3 encoding and DVD playback.)

More power! Arr arr arr!

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Carson Summit review

Published on February 13, 2006 in Web2.0. 0 Comments

The trip to London for the Carson “Future of Web Apps” Summit was well worth the trouble.
What did we learn:

  • Travelling to London by car with Eurotunnel is cheap, easy and flexible. Plus, driving on the left for a while adds a sense of adventure. (Roundabouts rock!)
  • If you arrive only 10 minutes before the Eurostar leaves, that’s too late, as Francois and Denis discovered.
  • >> Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us:
    minimal presentation (1 line per slide) but lots of good ‘lessons-learned’ while starting up del.icio.us. I particularly liked: add lots of caching when possible, latency is OK is some places, decide on how much community you want to build in, don’t make stuff too easy, use consistent grammar and design conventions, respect data ownership.
    “Idiots are a lot smarter than you“

  • >> Cal Henderson from Flickr:
    the minimal trend continues (each slide is a picture from Flickr with 1 word)! No real new info, but entertaining presentation. He claims AJAX should be named ‘A’ because it’s not always JavaScript and not always XML. Why anyone would develop in AVAX (using VBscript, and restricting supported clients to only IE) is anyone’s guess.
    “Flickr is massively multiplayer online photo sharing“

  • >> Tom Coates from Yahoo!:
    good speaker, great speech. His ‘URL fetishist‘ confession will surely haunt him for a while. I liked the concept of ‘first order objects’.
    “Browse the news by things that happened to capricorns“

  • Lunch with some of the Belgian attendees: Bart, Werner, Yoeri, Jesse, Mathias en enige-meid-in-de-bijt Ine. Pizza and pasta in less than 45 minutes.
  • >> David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals
    Not a new presentation, but RubyOnRails remains a remarkably sexy developer’s framework, and David a funny presenter. “Flexibility is overrated”, “PHP is the devil”, … The presentation was filled with great one-liners.
    “One question: Does it scale? Answer: Yes“

  • >> Shaun Inman from Mint:
    talked about the importance of having APIs with the concrete example of Mint (web statistics software) and the possibility to add ‘Peppers’.

  • >> Andrew Shorten from Adobe: wrong topic, wrong tone, wrong conference. That about covers it.
  • >> Ryan Carson from Dropsend:
    interesting talk and interesting slide design. Ryan spent £26.000 to build DropSend and explains where the money went.
    “Holy Crap, lawyers are expensive!”

  • >> Steffen Meschkat from Google:
    Steffen worked on Google Maps and helped develop the AJAX interface. He certainly knows his XMLHttpRequest inside out. ‘SSSS’ stands for Server Side Session State. So if it unexpectedly suspends all all servers without notification, that would be a Sudden Silent Synchronised Server Side Session State Suspension (or SSSSSSSS). He loses me when he dives in the browser inconsistencies.
    “Javascript: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

  • >> Panel discussion
    Steve Olechowski from FeedBurner announces the FeedFlare API. The first – and according to Ryan the best – question is “Many web apps are very specialised. Is the future of the web about focused tools?“.
  • Although London is an expensive city, the Tate Modern museum is free and as such worth even more than every penny: Rodin, Dali, Mondriaan, Picasso and then some less obscure dudes. (Picture by Ine)
  • Travelling back to Belgium was even more fun, because there was no need to rush and conversation was even better. Felt like auto-pilot and then we were in Gent.

All pictures are by Paperjam except where indicated.

In-depth coverage of the speeches: adactio.com and simon.incutio.com and blog posts about the conference.

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Lexmark printers with “Hardware Error 0502″

Published on February 11, 2006 in hardware. 200 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Good tip for the Lexmark All-in-one inkjet printer owners (mine is the X6170):

Lexmark Hardware Error 0502After some months of use, your printer might get the habit of stopping in the middle of a page and showing “Hardware Error 0502” on the LCD display. If you leave the printer alone for a while, it might start printing again. Then again, it might not. Pretty annoying.

The Lexmark support site will let you power off, remove the power cord for 30 seconds (!!), take out the cartridges and fiddle with some encoder strip. This whole procedure might take you up to 30 minutes and it will not help (been there, done that).

The real answer is given by a person called ‘clem’:

Lexmark metal barHardware Error: 0502.

On the multi function machine seems to be a coating on the metal rod that the cartridges travel on. Just wipe this rod with a kleenex and the problem seems to go away. Somehow it presents a drag on the cartridges and causes an error.

Clem
(from fixyourownprinter.com)

This works! Clean the sucker with a paper towel (another page talks about re-lubricating the thing, but that was not necessary in my case). The towel will be black (ink residu, presumably), but there you go printing to your heart’s desire again.
Lexmark problem solved
A big thank-you to Clem, Google and the wisdom of crowds!

UPDATE: also seems to work for some Dell printers (some of them are manufactured by Lexmark)

FON and the art of nuances

Published on February 7, 2006 in wifi. 0 Comments


It started with a juicy announcement for FON, Martin Varsavsky new venture: “FON can now count Google, Skype, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures as investors and backers” (for almost $22-million). Good news for any company. He continues the announcement as follows:

Also I am pleased to announced today that we have obtained the support of two significant ISPs for FON. In America Speakeasy has said that they welcome FON and in Europe, Glocalnet and FON have signed an agreement so Glocalnet sells its services FON ready and the Swedish foneros will soon be able move around Stockholm and other cities with their WiFi enabled gadgets.
from blog.fon.com @ Feb 5

So the terms are “support” and “welcome“. That does not sounds as a signed contract but more like a “OK, we won’t make life hard for one another”.
In an interview with Reuters, Martin changes the wording:

Toward that end, Fon has signed up GlocoNet, the second largest ISP in Sweden, and U.S.-based Speakeasy of Seattle.
Varsavsky said he also holds out hope of convincing potential adversaries among established ISPs such as Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom AG, AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. of working with his “foneros.”
from today.reuters.com @ Feb 5

Now it’s “signed up”. That’s a different issue, it means that there should be a bunch of papers with signatures. Onfortunately, Speakeasy does not recall signing anything:

Speakeasy is the only national ISP I am aware of in the U.S. that encourages sharing their connections. (Update: Speakeasy says there�s no deal.)
from wifinetnews.com @ Feb 5

With a follow-up story the next day:

On the other hand, he mentions several times in his blog and in news stories the word agreement, support, bargain, revenue sharing. Speakeasy has no agreement of any kind with Fon, which would tend to contradict any sense that Fon was sharing revenue with them (unilaterally?) and thus argues that Varsavsky was trying to broaden his appeal by mentioning a U.S. ISP.
Question for Google, Skype, Sequoia, and Index: Did Varsavsky claim a Speakeasy contract? If so, did you do due diligence? If not, will he disclaim his statements?
from wifinetnews.com @ Feb 6

Which leads Om Malik to comment the following:

Seems to me that FoN made a bone-headed move on day one of their very public life.
gigaom.com

and Mark Evans to something along the same lines:

In fact, Speakeasy claims FON is replicating its strategy called NetShare in which individuals could generate revenue by sharing their wireless connections. Looks like a big P.R. fiasco for FON.
evans.blogware.com

So, in the first week of being a solidly funded company, supported by some really big names, FON can start to explain that they claimed something that was not really there. I can only hope that the SpeakEasy ‘deal’ did not play a role in the FON valuation process.

I think Martin needs a good PR/Communications manager sitting next to him in interviews, to avoid him of getting carried away.

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