Author Archives: John

Fuji Xerox, Seoul

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Outside the window of room 1036 at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel, Seoul is a building with a very bright Fuji Xerox neon advertisement on it. The photo shows the sign at its lowest brightness; the other end of the scale has the whole background area glowing bright-white. At some point in the night though it is turned off – when I woke up this early morning it was off. I had left the curtains and inside shutters open when I went to sleep to make sure I woke up early enough to pack, have breakfast and make it to the airport (anything up to a two hour bus ride from the City Air Terminal in the COEX complex).

As is pretty much always the case in Seoul, there is traffic visible in the bottom of the photo. Everywhere we went by car, we ended up stuck in heavy traffic. there doesn’t seem to be anywhere that is not jammed solid with cars, busses, trucks and motorcycle couriers (who use the pedestrian walkways as well as the streets).

Whoa!

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This billboard was outside Balboa Park BART station in San Francisco last Monday when I was there on my way to the airport. I don’t recall ever seeing any billboard ads for emergency rooms before; I didn’t think it was the kind of thing you had time to consider shopping around for.

Gizmo from Korea

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At the end of a week in Seoul for a business trip, and I’ve been using my Gizmo Project account to make calls back to the US and the UK from my room at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel. Since I had only the Linux laptop with me though, I could not use the Gizmo Project client (the Linux version was pushed out until next month sometime). Instead, I have been using the X-Lite client from Xten (see my previous post for configuration information).

The call quality has been excellent for every call – at least as good as calling on the regular telephone in the hotel room. We also tried one incoming call (via one of the access numbers) and that worked well too. The price of the all the calls I have made this week using it doesn’t add up to the normal fee the hotel charges just for making a single calling card call, and that’s before the calling card per-minute fees. Of course, I did have to pay US$20 per day for the internet connection in the room, but I was paying that anyway for email and network connectivity.

Burning Clouds

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Heading home from dinner tonight I noticed that the clouds were ‘burning’ in the sunset. Having the camera with me, I drove up to the old naval air station on Alameda, and managed to get a few shots. A little magic with Photoshop resulted in this photo. I wish I’d had the tripod with me; even with the Canon image stabilisation feature, the 300mm lens is too long to handhold.

Photo Contests

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There seem to be a lot of photo contests around at the moment. The most recent I’ve seen being from Animal Planet and Life Magazine. I was debating entering this one, but then I noticed this in the official rules:

Submission of a photo further constitutes the entrant’s consent to irrevocably assign and transfer to Sponsor and Animal Planet any and all rights, title and interest in the photo, including, without limitation, all copyrights.

I would be willing to let them have an unrestricted license to use the photo if it was the winning photo, after all they are paying for that with the prize. But this rule goes further than a license, and it also goes further than just the winning photo. Essentially, this rule means that they get total ownership of a large number of photos without paying anything to most of the photographers for the privilege.

And it is not just this one contest. I’ve seen this type of wording in the rules of every photo contest I’ve looked at this year.

X-Lite & GizmoProject

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Looks like I will be heading back over to South Korea in the near future, and this time I would like to keep in touch while I’m there using my GizmoProject account. Unfortunately, the Linux version of the GizmoProject’s client is not here yet (though it is due in August, so I am still hopeful that I’ll have it before I leave), and since it is a business trip I’ll have to take the Thinkpad with me rather than the PowerBook.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that if it is possible to configure hardware adapters to work with Gizmo, then it should be possible to configure a softphone. I have used a couple of softphones in other circumstances: Kphone for my Asterisk project at Devicescape, and Xten’s X-Lite. The latter is a lot more polished (although getting it to accept a configuration always confuses me), so I thought I’d try that first.

Installation on Linux is simple: just decompress the archive and run the binary 🙂 The screen shot of the SIP settings panel shows my configuration (obviously, replace the first two blurred out numbers in there with your own SIP number – the instructions for setting up a hardware adpater tell you how to find this if you don’t already know it – the Register setting I left at default; it becomes a number once the client registers). The only other change I made was to go into the advanced settings and disable all the codecs except GSM and ILBC since those are the two that the hardware adapter instructions said were supported.

Then I tried an international call from my Linux laptop to the UK, using the Plantronics DSP500 USB headset that I use on the Mac and it worked perfectly. It even shows up in the call history on the Gizmo Project website.

SF Marathon Start

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Around 5am on Sunday morning as crowds of runners prepare for one of the three races. Down at the ferry building it was becoming a pleasant morning; further around the course, up by the Golden Gate bridge and even in the park, the morning fog so typical of San Francisco was still dense and the air was cold and wet as a result.

By just after 8am (5 hours into the day for me) my girlfriend was finished with the run, and we were heading off to dim sum with friends. All of that before I normally wake up on a Sunday, or, for that matter, any day of the week.

Check on your results (or results of friends) over at the official marathon website.