How to Forward Your Mobile Phone's Voicemail to Google Voice with a Full Google Voice Account (and Still Use Your Mobile Phone with Your Google Number)

Google recently announced the option to use Google Voice with your existing number.  By selecting this option when you sign up for Google Voice, Google Voice effectively becomes an enhanced voicemail service with capabilities like SMS alerting, archiving, and transcripts, but you lose out on many other great features like ringing multiple phones or ListenIn.  Given this, I'm not sure why anyone would want to sign up for this limited service.

Instead, you can sign up for a full Google Voice account and get Google Voice voicemail for your existing number--plus preserve the option to use all of Google Voice's other features with a new number if you like.  With this option, whether someone calls your mobile phone number or your Google number, Google Voice will handle your voicemail.

Here's how to setup your mobile phone to use Google Voice's voicemail with a full Google Voice account:

1. Sign up for a Google Voice account.  Note that you'll need an invite to join, currently
2. Select the option to create an account with a Google Number rather than a non-Google number
3. Add your mobile phone to your Google Voice account
4. Go to Settings in Google Voice and click on the "Activate Google voicemail on this phone" link
5. Follow Google Voice's popup instructions to forward your phone's voicemail to Google Voice
   
6. Go back to Settings in Google Voice and click the "Edit" link on the settings for your mobile phone
7. Click "Show advanced settings"
8. Under the "Forwarding Options" section, set "Go straight to voicemail."  This will ensure that Google Voice won't try to ring your other phones once your mobile phone has forwarded to voicemail

That's it!  Now, when someone calls your mobile phone number and you don't answer, it will go to Google Voice's voicemail--just like with Google's Google Voice With Your Own Number service.  But, you still have the option to switch to your Google number in the future and take advantage of all of Google Voice's other features.  So, for example, if someone calls your Google number, it will also ring your mobile phone.

Cloud Storage Hubbub

Why is it that the media is still writing articles about whether Microsoft and T-Mobile's Sidekick data loss issue is going to put a damper on cloud storage, but nobody is asking whether Apple's bug in Snow Leopard that deletes all personal data is going to stop people from storing data locally?  Articles reporting initially on each incident came out within a few days of each other.

Part of the reason that the Sidekick failure--and it is a catastrophic failure--is causing people to question cloud storage is because everyone is writing articles asking this question.  But, nobody is writing articles asking anything similar about Apple.

The Sidekick incident doesn't illustrate a fault of cloud storage versus local storage--it just shows that you still need to care about protecting your data, no matter where you store it.  Maybe the fact that everyone is writing about Sidekick rather than Snow Leopard illustrates that Cloud Computing is even sexier and more buzz-worthy than Apple!

MRG Presentations and Videos from the Summit

I'm back from Chicago from another great Red Hat Summit.  I have uploaded my two presentations from the 2009 Red Hat Summit online:

• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update
• Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

As an additional treat, you can also view videos of one of my sessions, as well as our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote, which highlighted cloud computing with MRG and other technologies.  I can't link to the videos directly, but you can find them at

• http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/highlights/ 

Brian Stevens' keynote is on the first tab.  My MRG presentation is on the Summit Sessions tab.

Finally, you can watch a demo video of cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG.  In this video, I bridge and aggregate three different clouds together (a local render cloud, an internal cloud provisioned by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Amazon EC2) into one seamless render cloud for film rendering.  This video created quite a buzz at the Summit, so enjoy!

Red Hat Enterprise MRG at the Red Hat Summit

Next week is the Red Hat Summit in Chicago.  We'll be featuring Red Hat Enterprise MRG there prominently:

• Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG
  
• MRG Messaging: A Programmer's Overview 
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid) Update and Roadmap
• A booth demonstrating cloud computing with MRG
• A special demo during our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote on cloud computing

I'll be at the Summit presenting the cloud computing and MRG update sessions.  I hope to see you there!

(The direct links to the sessions at the summit web site don't load that well due to the fancy javascript on that site.  You can go to http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/agenda/tracks/ and find the tracks manually to get a much better view of the info)

The Easy Way to Install TweetDeck on Linux and Work Around Error #5100

I tried installing TweetDeck on my Fedora Linux laptop and ran into an Error #5100.  I did a Google search, and it turns out that many other people have run into this error and solved it by doing things like downloading Adobe AIR and TweetDeck, and installing these files manually as root.

I found a much easier way: run FireFox (or whatever browser you use) as root, go to http://tweetdeck.com/, and click the "Download Now" link.  Everything works!

Update:  according to smmehadi at Adobe, installing xterm first is the truly easy and recommended way to solve this issue.  http://www.adobe.com/products/air/systemreqs/

MRG In The Open Source Cloud Computing Forum

Red Hat is hosting an online event, the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, on July 22, 2009.  Matt Farrellee from the MRG team will be presenting on how Condor, the Grid component in MRG, helps with building and adopting clouds during the 5th session at 11:30am.

The event is free also features lots of other great sessions.  Read more about it here and then register to attend!

Introducing QpidComponents.org

We've launched a new Web site, http://qpidcomponents.org.  This site features additional components and tools for enterprise AMQP messaging that we have developed for Apache Qpid.  We also ship productized and supported versions of these components and tools in Red Hat Enterprise MRG.

Notably, QPidComponents.org includes a high-speed persistence library and management tools.  Why don't we just include these components in the QPid project?  One major reason is that they're licensed under open source licenses other than the Apache license.  For example, because the persistence library tightly ties to Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, we can't license that code under the Apache license.

Check out http://qpidcomponents.org if you use QPid!