I read this article with disbelief it discusses how nearly all the VOIP protocols like SIP and MGCP were not designed with NAT routing in mind. So where are the people who designed them so we can take them out and shoot them.

The story doesn't end there because of a lack of native NAT traversal support lots of companies are developing solutions (proprietary solutions) that work over NAT. What a complete mess that is going to be.

So what does this mean for your average company? Well basically if you want to switch to VOIP using a generic protocol like MGCP you can't use a NAT router and your going to need an Internet IP address for each phone! I think that SIP is the most NAT friendly of the protocols and is moving in the right direction.

We are trailing a VOIP service offered by dasBlog/www.voxicon.co.uk">Voxicon it took several weeks to get the phones about five support calls to set them up and we can only use one because we only have one spare internet IP address. We are also trailing SkypeIn / Out, it took two minutes to download and we ordered a couple of USB phones over the web which arrived in two days. So far Skype is off to a better start, it lacks some of the Hunt group and Call Forwarding and Faxing features that the Voxicon solution offers but it is a lot cheaper, about £150 a year per phone cheaper.

Dane R Petersen always has an amusing take on things. Today he has written about his hobby kitesurfing namley adding a 5th line for saftey reasons. He also mentions how many people got killed in Pakistan at a recent kiting festival.

BBC Article on the Pakistani festival.

We use a set of three triggers to Audit all Insert, Update and Delete activity on every table in our database. We have a piece of SQL that auto generates trigger create scripts for each table automatically. This means that every time we make a structural alteration to a table we must re-run the script for that table and update the triggers as part of the release.

In the tables with lots of columns we noticed poor performance during updates, looking in Query Analyser at the Execution Plan revealed that for each update there were multiple scans of the Inserted and the Deleted pseudo tables.

This was happening because the Update Audit trigger had an Insert statement in it for each column in the table. The Insert statement caused the scan of the Inserted and Deleted pseudo tables. I remembered reading in the books online that you can use IF UPDATE (column) to test if a column has been updated, by placing this statement around each Insert statement we were able to greatly increase the speed with which the trigger operates, because the Inserted/Deleted scans were only happening for the columns that had been updated.

I dedicate this blog post to Kimberly Tripp's interview on .Net Rocks, it was a great show full of invaluable SQL Server performance tuning advice.

Chris Pirillo podcast interviewed Joel Comm of World Village and talked about how they both dramatically increased the revenue AdSense generated from their sites. If you are running a popular site and drowning in the overheads you should check out the show.

Joel has created a downloadable online book with detailed information on all the tips and tricks needed to maximise adsense revenue. In the interview he claims to be earning US$ 15,000 a month from adsense revenue, check it out. (cost $99.00)

If you devote a lot of your spare time to a popular community site but have resigned yourself to keeping the day job it seems you ought to take another look, maybe you could turn your passion into a career!

More and more Job sites are putting RSS Job feeds on there sites. CW Jobs have there feeds organised by type Permie or Contract and then by skill which works well for the techie's like me.

UKLug is a site that aggregates jobs from 19 other sites and allows you to search using keywords and then use your RSS aggregator subscribe to your search. An example search: +london +chef

If your in the job adverstising business and don't have an RSS feed on your site then you had better add one quick!

Podcasting brings a new opportunity for unsigned artists to showcase their work, currently podcaster's producing talk shows that want to play a couple of songs to break things up a little will be loathed to acquire the necessary licences and permissions required by popular artists on major labels. What seems to happen is they will either promote an artist who is a friend or solicit permission from artists they like directly. Some small record labels are allowing podcasters to play their artists songs to help increase their visibility. Dave Slusher over at evilgeniuschronicles.org does a regular podcast and has been able to negotiate with  Michelle Shocked to play some of her music on his show.

What will change things? If and it is a big if, an unsigned artist can sell a 100,000 albums by promoting themselves over the web using there own site, podcasting, word of mouth then this will open the gates. I would like to see music available on the web at cost and artists making money from merchandise, DVDs and Live shows, and record labels going out of business or at least radically altering their business model.

At the moment I'm aware of two methods for legally downloading and listening to music. A subscription based service where you pay a monthly fee and can listen to as much music you like, if you stop subscribing then you can no longer listen to anything you have previously downloaded. A fee for each track or album you download, which once downloaded is yours forever.

Lets be clear about one thing DRM is a feature demanded by music publisher's before they would let companies like iTunes and Napster distribute music over the web. The voices of millions of consumers were not clamouring 'we want DRM'.

I want to consume music in a fashion that offers me the most convenience, not the music publishers. That means I want to chose the format Mp3, WMA, AAC, Ogg, the quality / file size and I want 100% accurate metadata.. Once I have paid my fee to download, I want to own that track and I want to be able listen to it on any digital music player I chose to buy. Why should I be offered this service? I am prepared to pay for it. Until this service is a available I will buy the CD from sites like Play247.com and rip the tracks to MP3 using Cdex which does a reasonable job of looking up the Artist, Album and Track Names most of  the time.

My big problem with paying to download music that has DRM is that I'm doing the right thing by not downloading pirated music and coughing up cash, I'm doing the honest thing but the music publishers are saying 'we still don't trust you you might give this to your friends'. There are some sites like MP3Tunes.com and www.magnatune.com that offer downloads without DRM but my impression is that they aren't able to get access to artists signed by major labels.

There is an alternative to pay for download, download for free increasingly new un-signed artists are putting up there music on the web for download, the SXSW festival posted a 2 gigabyte bit torrent file that showcased most of the acts playing at SXSW. I have been working my way through the 755 tracks and what strikes me is that the talent and even the production quality on a lot of these tracks is as good as what you'll hear on the radio.

EDIT: Russ Agrees and since writing this post I have discovere www.allofmp3.com a russian site that lets you download mp3's without DRM, there are some legalities you will need to consider as using this site in certain countries may be illeagal.

First let me say that I don't believe your own blog is a good place to ask a question but sod it.

What I want to know is if anyone has come up with an elegant way to take an existing ASP app and extend it using ASP.NET with a view to eventually replacing all the ASP pages with aspx ones?

Can the two separate tools be made to form one app seamlessley from the user point of view?

Oh I'm talking about a public website so anonymous authentication on the server.

Stuart Henshall at Skype Journal has a piece a new utility that will record a conversation on Skype, check it out

You can read more info in the Skype Forum

Essentially if you want to interview someone using skype and record the conversation for your podcast this tool will do it. It's free if you can tolerate advertisments and $14.95 without the ad spam.

Now people can call you on your skype phone from the their mobile phone or landline. You pay a rental charge for the number currently 30 euros for twelve months and your up and running. I think this happened on the 10th March I can't believe I have only just seen it!

Countries this is available for:
   France 
   Hong Kong S.A.R., China 
   United Kingdom 
   United States 

Stuart Henshall runs the Skype Journal Blog he seems to have the skinny on everything to do with Skype.