I discovered this site via http://www.feedmap.net/ , it is interesting to see how nearby other bloggers are simply as a measure of how commonplace blogging is becoming. My blog is not nearly as social as bluemeanie. I am very tech focused so tend only to read other techie blogs (check my blogroll) reading bluemeanie it is clear different people have differen reasons for keeping a blog.

The bluemeanie site contains a nice content focused on friends and family and travelling with lots of picures.

This entry contains a photo of our local park, 'Master Park'. http://bluemeanie.org/weblog/comments/master-park/

If any of the bluemeanie bloggers surf in here, then I would just like to say 'Hello to a fellow Oxted blogger'.

 

I read this on the monowall mailing list, it was posted by Michael Graves

 

"Sure. Although it helps to know what protocols you run through m0n0. My Asterisk server places outgoing calls via IAX2 and accepts incomming calls via both IAX2 and SIP.

You absolutely have to start with a real world measurment of your connect speeds up and down. Your traffic shapping must not saturate either of those or the benefit will be lost.

The use the Magic Shaper Wizard on the Traffic Shaping tool. This will setup basic rules, pipes and queues. You should have two pipes; Total_upload & Total_download.

Here's where I change the setup a little. I add a third pipe called Dedicated_IAX_upload. I split my upload data rate between Total_upload and Dedicated_IAX_upload. In my case on Covad ADSL with a measured 650kbps upload I set my total upload speed for only 600kbps. I then assign 384kbps to pipe 2 (Total_upload) and 256kbps to pipe 3

(Dedicated_IAX_upload.)

In essence, I full time assign about 40% of my outbound bandwidth to the voip stuff.

Then in the rules section of traffic shaper I add two rules for my Asterisk traffic. All UDP traffic from the servers IP to the wan is driected to pipe3. All UDP traffic from the wan to the server is assigned to Queue 8 which is High_priority_download.

Of course you need firewall NAT and port forwarding settings in place as well. The traffic shaping isn't port specific in my arrangement.

I've had my Asterisk & m0n0 system in use for about 2 years. You need to understand that traffic shaping won't cure bandwidth issues, but it will make some situation more acceptable. I found that adding G.729 codecs to my server was also very helpfull in reducing the demand for bandwidth.

Also, I don't use any p2p stuff beyond Skype...which I'd rather not use but many of my overseas coworkers are addicted."

Recently a friend asked me about which VOIP solution is best this is what I told him.

"Skype is the easier to setup it handles NAT traversal very well, the handsets we use for Skype (<£30) are USB so need to be plugged into a PC to work. I believe you can now get Skype Adaptors for normal analog phones and Skype phones that don't need a PC to work, I don't have any experience of these and they will be more expensive ~£100.

VOIPtalk offer SIP/IAX2 services, the handsets that support these protocols start at £50 but you should spend at least £80 to get a half decent one. You will need a CAT5 socket to connect them to your LAN although you could use WiFi. If you want to have several phones in your house with each room acting as an extension then you should think about installing Linux/Asterisk onto an old PC and run your own mini PBX. This will take a lot more setting up and the learning curve is a lot steeper. You pay a one-off fee of £10 for an inbound 0845 number and buy credit in £5-£50 chunks, you can set your account to auto top-up to save you the hassle of topping up via their website. If you go the VOIPTALK route make sure your Broadband Router has QoS functionality otherwise you won't be able to hear people when you are downloading large files. It will also need port forwarding and I would recommend using IAX2 over SIP as it only requires one port to be forwarded.
Some (most) routers will not allow SIP to traverse NAT.

In terms of call quality / reliability Skype has the edge in Internet=>Internet calls (which are also free) and Voiptalk has the edge in Internet=>Landline/Mobile calls.

Re call charges, I don't think there is a lot in it but you can checkout their respective websites.

I'm sure your aware that more and more ISP's are starting to offer VOIP services so you might be able to get what your looking for that way."

 

This product seriously kicks some ass it is straightforward to install and makes managing multiple guest OS's as easy as pie the best thing about it is the price... FREE! Apparently VMWare offered their equivalent product for free first which allowed MS to do the same without getting clobbered by the US Anti-Trust laws. Remember you still have to buy a licence for your host and guest operating systems they are free.

I have been reading some of my old posts and they seem to fall into three categories, stuff I discover thats great and want to tell the world about, stuff I discover that sucks and want to tell the world about and stuff I don't want to forget. 

For me it is theraputic writing about something that sucks, afterwards I relax a little in the knowledge anyone else can read my account (if they google and find it). What is really good is if others contribute their contrary views by commenting because then I have to rethink my original view and decide if I was wrong or right.

I just got my company to pay $30 for Winzip 10.0 for my work pc, only trouble is anyone I send a zip file to who hasn't also got winzip 10.0 can't unzip the archive and that includes me at home :o(. I'm sure there is a way of configuring 10.0 to produce archives that are  backwardly compatible but I would expect it to work 'out of the box' or to at least to have highlighted the option during the installation. In this day and age with products of this maturity we shouldn't have to deal with this crap.

My company switched it's colocation provider six months ago to The Bunker, we provide a hosted service for our customers financial services operations. Our application uses relatively low bandwidth but needs very good SLA's for availability.

The Bunker is an Ex MOD facility based at a secret location in Kent (it's not that big a secret but they don't put the address on their website). The facility is in concrete bunker that is thirty feet underground and has eight feet thick concrete ceilings and is capable of withstanding the EMP from a nuclear detonation.

We have found their staff to be very professional and they take the security side of things very seriously. Based on the last six months I could definitely recomend them.

Uber blogger and all round nice guy Scoble has handed in his notice and joined a startup venture. He is not bad mouthing Microsoft but from reading his blog I sense the slow pace of change in such a large organisation like MS was a contributing factor to his decision.

If you have ever read Robert's blog you will know what a thoroughly honest guy he is. and what a lot of techie bloggers aspire to become. I for one wish him well in his new endavour I'm sure it will be a success.

You can read his blog here: http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard on a recent episode of Dot Net Rocks! that Adobe are not going to let Microsoft release Office 2007 with a native 'Save as PDF' feature. This is a feature that I have been desperate to see introduced for years. I have made use of various 3rd party plugins but none have supported all the features I required and been trouble free to use. If MS and Adobe cannot reach agreement the feature will be available as a separate downloadable plugin.

Apparently Adobe want MS to charge more to customers purchasing Office 2007 and to pay a royalty to Adobe, this begs the question... Is Adobe an evil money grabbing corporation?

Adobe may be worried that their sales of PDF authoring software will be affected. I can't really see this happening as 99% of people will buy a $30 plugin to convert their doc's to PDF instead of a $500 Adobe tool.

Adobe's own PDF viewer has been suffering from bloatware syndrome over the last few versions 5.0 - 7.0 and I have read a lot of people saying version 6.0 was brown and smelt funny. I have just started using FoxIT's pdf viewer which is a 1.2 MB download. It is fast to load and feels uber responsive when navigating through documents, it is still early days so I'm not sure how robust it is yet.

I think Adobe need to listen to the humble consumers if they want to enjoy success in the consumer software mass market.

 

One of my coleagues has recently been working on a module that uses the easyPDF .Net component to convert Word 2000 documents to PDF format. He had evaluated many third party components and easyPDF seemed to offer the best performance, was straightforward to implement and not too expensive. 

Everything was going well, the module deployed successfully to a windows 2000 server and processed several thousand documents in our test enviroment.

The next step was to ship the server to our colocation facility, we were already running the server on the same domain via VPN so we were confident that this would be straightforward.

When we fired up the server at the colo the module which ran as an NT service started up it then started to produce a document and then it promptly froze and after 50 seconds a timeout error was written to the log. We were puzzled as to what could be causing this and spent the next few days trying to figure it out. To cut a long story short at the colocation facility we did not attach keyboard or a mouse to the server, when these were attached and the server was restarted our application started working!

MS do warn against using Word Automation but in this case we didn't have any choice, we are looking forward to the release Office 12 and the native PDF output capability of Word.

UPDATE: Still not working after a reboot the dreaded freezing has come back! Will update if we figure it out.

Another Update: We have had no problems getting this working on desktop OS's like W2K Pro and XP Pro but on servers it is just hanging.