Binary Tuberculosis

Just got back from The Capital Grille. Went there with a few friends, which is always fun. It’s primarily a steakhouse and apparently their steaks are well done (no pun intended…OK, maybe slightly intended).

I got the calamari, parmesan truffle fries, and salmon with the two mustard sauce. Calamari was well prepared, but slightly oily but the highlights were the peppers. No complaints about the parmesan fries (well, I didn’t see or taste any truffles actually), they were perfect, and I don’t even like parmesan. The salmon entree was definitely a good choice (for a non-steak eater), but it wasn’t exceptional, plus the two-mustard sauce was barely tasted. I should start eating steak and stop complaining about a steakhouse when I don’t order one I guess.

Also, earlier in the day I got some Guitar Hero II on at a friend’s place. This game is amazing. The End. Check Please.

Took some time this weekend and converted my old (oooold, haven’t touched it for years) Family Tree Maker family tree file to GEDCOM format. Why? Bringing the family tree to the Internet, that is why.

Installed PhpGedView on my web server, updated many a names and relationships, then sent out some accounts to some family folk so they could have access to the tree.

The most amazing part of all this is that now I can make changes from anywhere in the world. No more buying a program, installing it, keeping it updated, etc. Now it’s all free with multiple user capability. I’m the admin and the limited accounts have capabilities from either read-only to full access. I’ve given them editing capability with final change authorization going through me (don’t want people changing things stupidly or deleting whole subtrees when they get bored).

Best part is that now I don’t have to keep bugging people to give me their info, they can update it all themselves, or at least check it for inconsistencies. Think I’ll donate some $$ to the PhpGedView developers, they have the one of the most active projects on SourceForge (for June ‘06 it was #1), plus gotta support open source software. Gonna test drive it for a few weeks, see how things shape up with it though, but right now it’s thumbs up.

I registered my PSTN (my new voip landline number) with an ENUM directory tonight (e164.org). How does this affect any of you? Well, if you try to call me via a VoIP provider that supports ENUM lookups (e.g. VoXaLot), then your calls to me will be free and quality/latency will be the utmost since it will be a true point-to-point call via the Internet.

Not all VSPs (Voice Service Providers) offer this, but I’m sure they will in the future, just to have better quality and lower prices for the company AND the user. Not all will though, I’m looking at you Vonage and Comcast Digital Voice, close-minded VoIP providers.

To better explain ENUM lookup, think of it as a phone call placed within the same network. For instance, if you and your buddy are both using the same VoIP client (e.g. Google Talk, Yahoo! Voice, or Vonage), then you can talk with them for free since the data travels directly to the other person on the same network. Now if you want to make a call from Yahoo! Voice to Vonage, well that’s going to cost $$. Why? Because the data has to travel through old fashioned means, the plain old telephone service (POTS).

With ENUM, Yahoo! could just look up the phone number in a directory, find the information it needs (where to send the call, to whom, etc), then connect the call via the Internet, which is cheaper than going over the POTS system. Of course that example had some technical flaws (Yahoo! doesn’t use UDP for its SIP and Vonage blocks non-Vonage access to its servers because they’re greedy), but in theory it works.

I just realized that I should have used cell phones as an example, mobile-to-mobile within cell companies, same network.

There are many other alternatives to using Comcast Digital Voice or Vonage or any other proprietary VSP and almost all the others allow true access to their servers, as true VoIP access should be, but companies like to restrict its customers to get that extra penny (e.g. Microsoft, RIAA, Sony…and many many others).

Been pretty busy last couple days, real busy, haven’t been able to shoot the shit blog wise. Here are few of the highlights:

• Installed the Snap Preview plugin (scroll over a link in a post)
• Filed my taxes (~$500 Refund, woo hoo)
• Closed my BB&T bank account
• Opened a Bank of America bank account
• Consolidated my loans
• Got my credit report (which led to many more steps to remove some erroneous account data, what a pain)
• Finally got my car washed (not a machine wash, but the hand-cloth type)
• Got my watch repaired (after busting it during Katy’s farewell bash)
• Played around a lot with Microsoft Money 2007
• …Plus much more Boston based stuff I took care of that I don’t want to go into more detail about

I ordered a Dale And Thomas sampler, I can’t wait to get it, hurry up Monday!

I have just leveled in the world of the geek, and let me assure you, it is quite the rewarding experience.

What am I talking about? Slashdot of course, every geek worth his balls knows of its existence. My rite of passage? My first comment to hit 5 (Insightful no less). Jealous? I thought so.

Check it out, it’s related to my response concerning Skype/VoIP/SIP (I told you I was totally getting to it):
Re:Why Skype ?

Here’s a cut/paste for when the link stops working:

I’m certainly not a SIP guru, but going to try and respond some of your points that have me honestly confused.

2. No NAT issues (SIP is retarded with NAT - check out how SDP works).

SIP works with STUN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN) servers, so you shouldn’t really be getting NAT issues. Of course, I’d say that Skype has more NAT issues since it’s P2P and would probably work better with an open incoming port. SIP just connects to a server and doesn’t require open incoming ports (unless you have your own PBX server at home, which is pretty advanced for the regular SIP user).

What’s SDP?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockets_Direct_Protocol or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Description_Protocol or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery

4. Same client, multiple platforms thanks to Qt.

Isn’t it better to have many many more clients across every platform than to be stuck with only 1 on every platform? Plus have many more hardware choices as well (if you want to connect your home phone to VoIP)?

5. Voice quality is related to codec, not call setup protocol, which is what SIP is, so your voice quality comment is senseless.

How is SIP’s voice quality not related to the chosen codec? And why would a setup protocol dictate voice quality in SIP? I honestly don’t understand. Kind of like saying that since I’m driving on the right side of the road my car is faster, when it’s engine (codec) that really matters most.

6. Seamless integration with landlines.

How is SIP’s integration not “seamless”? Open up your client, dial a phone number and voila, their landline rings. I would say it’s better than Skype’s actually. You can actually get a real phone number in Japan (for example) that will ring your SIP phone/PC in the US. Skype has this for around 15 countries, but SIP has DID (real landline numbers) numbers for many more countries (if not all). Plus SIP vendors have number portability as well.

8. SIP is not consistent across vendors, with many proprietary extensions. …the list goes on. They just did it right, and it works for everyone. SIP is mostly a joke.

Most vendors that use SIP can communicate with each other. Some vendors block outside SIP calls (e.g. Vonage) while others use their own proprietary SIP (e.g. Comcast Digital Voice), but they block outside connections too. So it doesn’t really matter if they’re proprietary or not, a SIP client can’t access their network anyway unless they go the landline route.

I’ve got nothing against Skype (I’ve used it tons), I just like SIP better because of its better call rates (you can always get a vendor cheaper than Skype), number of choices available (SIP hardware, software, vendors), plus the fact that if you want, you can get down to the nitty gritty and do some amazing stuff with it (want to get sms notifications of voicemail? access 10 different vendors with different rates with just a press of a button on your phone? setup smart call forwarding, if you’re not at office, try home, then cell? Check voicemail on the web/email?).

Plus Skype is P2P, which is good for some things, but can use a lot of bandwidth when not in use, that’s why some college campuses and businesses don’t allow Skype.

So I dropped using Mozilla Sunbird as my calendaring application. It has some great features (iCal support, WebDAV syncing, email/sms notifications, etc) but it was just too unstable. I had gotten used to the instability in the program since I had been using it since the 0.1x versions, started making own backups and whatever, but the last straw? The removal of features for “ease of use” and the stability just kept getting worse as the versions went up, isn’t that an oxymoron?

So I wanted to switch to a calendaring application that could import an iCal calendar (most do nowadays, thanks to Apple and Mozilla using such an open standard). I also required synchronization, so that I could access the same information from my laptop (or from any PC in the world if possible). I finally ended up just going for a web-based calendar solution, just because the desktop applications were either too big/bloated or just didn’t have what I required. My final two choices? The built-in calendar in my webmail solution, Horde, or the Google Calendar*.

Horde’s calendar was pretty good, had everything I wanted plus it was mature enough in it’s release for everyday use. Since I also use it’s webmail features occasionally (when not using Mozilla Thunderbird on my laptop and desktop) this would have been perfect. Alas, it got beat by Google’s Calendar.

Google’s Calendar, very impressive, I love the way that it uses Ajax like many of Google’s online services, it just feels like I’m using an application instead of browsing a web page, plus it just feels a lot faster and smoother, not to mention it looks better than Horde’s solution. Plus it has public calendars that I can subscribe to for Holidays and such, they’re all color-coded differently and can be enabled/disabled on the fly. Plus reminders and ability to import/export to almost anything (RSS even).

I’ve been using Google’s Calendar for a while now and have absolutely no regrets, plus today I just started using GCalSync. It’s a free app for your cell phone that syncs your phone’s built-in calendar feature with whatever you have on your Google Calendar. It’s pretty handy for those times when you need to know what time the appointment was or when exactly you have a meeting.

*I looooooove Firefox 2. I was typing out this post and I accidentally closed the tab that contained the write page, BAM, everything I typed lost…Firefox 2 to the rescue! I clicked on the menu, selected “Undo Close Tab” and everything came back up perfectly sexily, even all the junk I had typed in the text box, now that’s impressive. Not to mention the amazing built-in spell checker that shows red lines under misspelled words you type (like Microsoft Word).

Oh thank crap! That HR 5252 Bill is dead baby, the Internet shall be neutral. That was the dumb bill that would allow an Internet Service Provider (e.g. Comcast or AT&T) to charge taxes to a company (e.g. Google) because their site gets a lot of traffic.

Why the hell would an ISP get in the middle of this? Easy, to get more money. It’s their job just to move the damn traffic, not to tell me what sites work and where I can go. Greed…ugh.

Read more about it here:
Huge Victory for Real People as Telco Bill Dies

And of course, the Wiki to the rescue, it tells us what Network Neutrality means.