Rui Carmo
July 29^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

Microsoft and BT partnership ※

Another little memento. As usual there is a lot I can’t say, but it is nice to see this going public after so much effort.

Rui Carmo
July 25^th 2021, in the evening · 5 min read

25 Years Of Video Calls

Roughly 25 years ago, I spent a little while at INESC and its little coterie of incubated companies (what we’d term “startups” these days) doing all manner of things I think are worth recounting.

Well, at least the ones in this peculiar little arc, of which I was reminded during a conversation I had this past week.

Eurescom

One of the reasons I got into the telco universe was an internship project I did for EURESCOM at the (now defunct) CPRM Marconi, and which I later picked up again at INESC. It was an international project with people from BT, Deutsche Telekom and a few other (now termed incumbent) telcos focusing on CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work).

And what did we work on? Well, we had… video calls.

More to the point, we tested H.323/T.120 compliant video conferencing and screen sharing software, drawing diagrams in a cross-platform canvas between Microsoft NetMeeting and some ugly Motif application on Sun boxes, and generally trying to figure out what the future would look like in the typically weird and over-complicated way telco standards bodies looked at the world.

In a weird precursor to this bright, amazing future we all now live in, I had a PC decked out with an Intel video capture card, a camera and a VGA monitor into which we tried to cram NetMeeting, a few video thumbnails, a whiteboard and some document to “collaborate” on.

Exactly like Teams, really, except that people actually believed video calls would be spent editing documents collaborativel at length (instead of presenting them and just following up with changes, which is what happens 99% of the times these days).

It’s amazing to realise that even though today’s hardware is a couple of (or more) orders of magnitude faster and we actually have touchscreens and pens as pretty much standard issue on many kinds of devices, shared whiteboards still haven’t improved substantially over the last two and a half decades.

And I don’t mean just in terms of usability, but also of applicability to most use cases. You’d think we’d have learned this lesson by now, right?

PC-BIT

Fast forward a few years, and I was pulled into a team at INESC that designed and implemented PC-BIT, an ISDN ISA card for desktop PCs that ingeniously did away with a bunch of proprietary components and implemented a fair chunk of the required protocols in software (initially in its own on-board low-end x86 CPU, and later on mostly off-loaded to the host PC).

Since most of the code was already written (by a friendly, infinitely patient russian guy called Sasha), my contribution was to debug (more than actually write) the multi-link PPP driver for Windows, since we needed MPPP support to take advantage of the two distinct 64Kbps channels you got with ISDN (2 B channels for data and a D channel for signalling).

Board development was sponsored by Portugal Telecom (which sold the board as its Cyberkit RDIS product) and was later moved to a hardware-centric iNESC spin-off called Octal (which seems to have vanished a while back)¹.

Two of my coursemates did the Solaris and Linux ports of those for the same generation of that hardware, but the driver abstractions were so different² that hardly any code was common, and I got so many blue screens that I could almost pick up what had happened from the abbreviated crash dumps alone.

And what did we run to stress test it? Well, NetMeeting, obviously (although FTP was a more reliable way to trigger connection upgrades). We also had other ISDN cards and desk video phones that could do H.320 calls, but it was fun to live in the future and do video calling over IP.

There is a lot more to tell about these times that deserves separate posts (like, for instance, the dramatic results of having our waxed wooden floors polished with copper brushes, which led to some amazing special effects when plugging a new machine into the floor mains sockets, which were coated with fine copper powder), but an interesting morsel is that my manager at the time went on to become the GM of Microsoft Portugal (and eventually rose to VP level after working his way around the world).

I still find it hilarious that, before leaving INESC, he gifted me a pretty unique book.

Dive Into Telco

Around the time of my PC-BIT antics, I also dabbled a bit with video conferencing over ATM (I had an ATM-25 network card in my desktop PC with a SPARC CPU four or five times faster than the PC itself), but fortunately ATM didn’t last long in the face of the TCP/IP onslaught and I eventually went into the ISP business, which is another story arc altogether.

Until very recently, the first time I had anything to do with setting up a video calling service was, of course, when 3G came about and people tried to use phones with postage stamp sized screens to do mobile-to-mobile and mobile-to-fixed video calls.

This was around 9/11, after which there was a burst of demand for standards-based, telco-grade room videoconferencing services to substitute for business travel (which dipped precipitously for a few months)³ and we had to figure out how to make it all work.

But in practice, nobody used 3GPP-based video calling much because the experience was atrocious regardless of what kind of equipment you had.

Telcos stuck to it as a flagship service because a) they could charge more and b) it was interoperable with room conferencing services, to the extent that some diehards at Vodafone even wanted to refuse carrying the iPhone 3G for not supporting video calls.

Pretty ironic, right?

One of these days I’ll probably write about those times, which were how I got into Asterisk, VoIP and IMS. In particular, one of the things I’m pretty sure I can finally write about is how back in 2005 I placed a voice call to our CEO’s mobile from across the room using a desk phone and a Linksys router with a janky 3G card.

That was a lot of fun, for a lot of reasons I won’t go into tonight…

Another thing I was involved in was getting Microsoft Mail to handle X.500 directory services (which is why I have so many LDAP scars) as part of an attemmpt at getting it to use X.400 transport, but good thing SMTP won that war… ↩︎
This was the dawn of NDIS, and most of the work as around wrapping CAPI in a way that made sense to NDIS and the dial-up stack. ↩︎
We had Tandberg booths at Vodafone, in which I spent many a day in much the same way I do in my office these days… ↩︎

Rui Carmo
July 18^th 2021, late night · 1 min read

FanFan ※

This weekend we got M1 hardware in the house (the entry-level Air, with 8GB RAM, because there was a €200 discount at a local retailer and the kids had been putting up with pretty outdated hardware) and I think this little app, even though originally meant as a joke, pretty much captures the gist of things.

These machines are almost unnaturally fast, usable and cool, and even though I intellectually knew it, using one, even for a few minutes, is like night and day. And its been going for two days on a single charge, too.

(The runner up, by the way, was a cheaper Lenovo Flex 5 with AMD Ryzen silicon, but Lenovo keeps pushing the crummy non-IPS models with APUs from a year ago, and even though I wouldn’t mind getting one for myself, the screen and the M1’s insane battery life were a no-brainer at that price.)

Rui Carmo
July 15^th 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

OP-1 Gets USB Audio Update ※

This a great example of how to keep your products relevant. A ten year old device now gets USB audio, making it an even better on-the-go four-track recorder and sound module. Need to update mine ASAP.

Rui Carmo
July 14^th 2021, at teatime · 1 min read

Windows 365 ※

This is pretty much how I do most of my work these days (including some meetings, since audio and video remote devices work pretty well), except that I currently land in a corporate WVD cluster and not a dedicated instance.

It is so much better and hassle-free that I seldom give if a second thought anymore, and the “killer app” for corporate environments if I ever saw one.

(Works great on an iPad and with multiple monitors on a Mac, too).

Rui Carmo
July 10^th 2021, at lunchtime · 6 min read

500 Days Later

It’s been roughly 80 days since my last update on the pandemic saga and my dataset has just crossed 500 rows, so I thought it was time to look at my dashboard, pick out some highlights and recount what has been going on since.

Rui Carmo
July 5^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

Infinidash goes viral, despite being fictional ※

I have to say that this was the most fun I’ve had online in a while. Some of the discussions were hilarious, and the impromptu webcasts and Twitter Spaces featuring key tech influencers who just had to join the fun were nothing short of spectacular.

That said, it’s amazing how much disinformation a small number of highly influential geeks can generate – especially as this is still going on, nearly a week after it got started.

I blame the fact that everyone involved could relate to the key point Joe Nash was trying to make: recruiting for technical roles is a completely broken process, and too subject to whims of fancy and hype cycles.

And, to be honest, it’s not the recruiters’ fault.

Rui Carmo
July 4^th 2021, in the morning · 3 min read

Year Break

This week was fiscal year close at work, and a deadline everyone was racing towards over the past few months. And now we’re past it, a few (ever short) days of limbo have set in while the entire company breathes a collective sigh of relief and re-organizes itself for next year.

Rui Carmo
July 2^nd 2021, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Microsoft acquires AT&T networking (Azure for Operators) ※

This is kind of a big deal, and has dominated my work landscape for the past couple of days, so I’m linking to it as a memento, as well as to the original PR.

Funny, though, to read through the press and, in typical US-centric myopia, see it compared to the AWS/DISH deal, since besides the acqui-hire bits, this is about getting an actual working network onto Azure now (whereas DISH is a new entrant with little to no footprint).

Rui Carmo
June 28^th 2021, in the afternoon · 1 min read

The Lightness of Windows ※

This is well worth reading, and Ben asks all the right questions (with a lot of in-depth reference material).

We are, indeed, living in interesting times.

Rui Carmo
June 27^th 2021, in the evening · 3 min read

Tinkering

I miss coding and building “in the small”. A lot, in fact, and my current role and the thundering herd of meetings that has converged around fiscal year close has consumed a lot of time and motivation to tinker.

Rui Carmo
June 25^th 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

Ars on Windows 11 ※

It looks pretty good (even if leaks had already shown a lot of it), and my three takeaways were (in no particular order):

The new window management (which I sort of have with Moom already, but is nicely done and something I already envy in the FancyZones PowerToy).
Running Android apps (which is the next step beyond the “My Phone” app).
And, of course, the huge swipe at Apple with the possibility for developers to use their own commerce engines and pay zero to Microsoft.

(Oh, right, and you get Teams preloaded as well. Nevermind.)

I like it, partly because the creature comfort bits are exactly the kind of low hanging fruit that Apple could have implemented years ago if they listened to feedback, and partly because it is a subject lesson on how to take the upper hand in opening up ecosystems.

Your move, Apple. And Monterey isn’t it.

Rui Carmo
June 24^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

The Cloud Genie ※

The first paragraph is sheer genius, so much so that I’m stealing a copy:

There’s a joke that I’ve always been partial to: a software engineering type rubs a lamp and a genie appears. The genie says that he’ll grant the engineer $1 billion, but only if they can spend $100 million in a single month with three rules. “You can’t gift it away. You can’t gamble with it. And you can’t throw it away.” The software engineer responds with “Well, can I use AWS?” The genie responds with “okay, there are four rules.”

Rui Carmo
June 24^th 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

Canonical to support Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux ※

Now this is unusual.

I wonder if Canonical is pursuing a new line of business here, as I can see other popular OSS tools (with an obvious industry bias, of course) slotting into this model.

Rui Carmo
June 21^st 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

Metroid Dread ※

I didn’t play all the Metroid games (I only came into the series when I fooled around with mobile emulators), but I quite like the way Nintendo keeps reinventing itself in various ways, and the game looks really nice and straightforward from an actual entertainment perspective (games often feel overwrought and gimmicky these days, so a slick, well thought out platformer feels really fresh).

Rui Carmo
June 19^th 2021, in the evening · 4 min read

Site Engine Update

It’s been a few months since I moved this site to Azure static storage, and I think a few notes are in order.

Rui Carmo
June 17^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

Facebook will start putting ads in VR ※

I am actually quite surprised they hadn’t started doing this yet. But it’s funny to realize that some 20 years ago I was selectively overriding some Quake III Arena map textures to do branded maps, and that we even wrote some scripts to rotate them as you would banner ads…

Rui Carmo
June 12^th 2021, at dinnertime · 3 min read

Rabbit Holes I Dive Into Every Now And Then (Alternative Operating Systems Edition)

Over the past few years, and as part of my perennial personal quest for a nicer computing experience, I keep finding myself going down a small set of technological rabbit holes, which I’m listing here in an attempt to remind future me that I might already done so too many times.

Rui Carmo
June 11^th 2021, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Microsoft announces Xbox TV app, xCloud streaming stick ※

Skating to where the puck is going to be.

Also, I haven’t had any time to play games, but since I’m posting this I might as well point out that Control is free on the Epic Store this weekend.

It’s one of the Game Pass titles I’ve been tinkering with, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Rui Carmo
June 8^th 2021, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Three Thoughts on WWDC 2021

So I finally watched the keynote and the State Of The Union¹, and came away with three main thoughts:

Rui Carmo
June 5^th 2021, in the morning · 15 min read

The Big Sur kernel_task Troubleshooting Saga

Following last week’s post regarding my kernel_task woes (which began nearly two weeks ago now), I decided to strip out the updates from that post and consolidate them here with a little more detail.

Rui Carmo
June 2^nd 2021, at late afternoon · 6 min read

The Arturia KeyLab Essential 61

Although I have nothing to show for it yet, my music hobby is getting serious enough that I wanted a “proper” keyboard in my office. This because even though we already have a very nice Clavinova, there is no way I can use it with Logic from several rooms away¹.

Rui Carmo
May 29^th 2021, in the afternoon · 3 min read

Sucking Up to kernel_task

Just after upgrading to Big Sur 11.4, my aging iMac has taken to stall every now and then with kernel_task taking up most of the CPU, which is tremendously annoying as it becomes unresponsive even when I’m using it as a souped-up thin client to access my corporate virtual desktop environment.

Rui Carmo
May 26^th 2021, in the evening · 1 min read

Oxide Computer ※

This is very, very cool. I know I’m in the public cloud business, but from an engineering standpoint (and given my long time interest in the hardware space) there is a lot here to take in, and I look forward to learning more (by the way, they have a podcast which has been just wonderful to listen to).

Congratulations for pushing the envelope in so many ways.

Rui Carmo
May 24^th 2021, at night · 1 min read

Remaining Issues in Big Sur ※

This is a massive list. I’ve only experienced some of these issues, but the interesting bit is that I have heard about most of them through complaints from my friends, so it seems pretty comprehensive.

I do have to wonder why this is still the case this far into the 11.x cycle, since Big Sur really ought to be a lot less buggy than Catalina.

I mean, it’s not as if Apple was actively ignoring macOS.

Right?