Category Archives: Web Technologies

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.

Top Ten Search Terms

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search enginesOne of the more interesting statistics that my hosting company provides for my website is the search terms that people use to find it. The top ten for July so far are:

    1 905 29.27% hawaiian flowers
    2 49 1.58% mexico
    3 47 1.52% bayport alameda
    4 32 1.03% safari
    5 31 1.00% parrot
    6 29 0.94% magic
    7 21 0.68% beer bottles
    8 20 0.65% vxworks
    9 17 0.55% detention centre
    10 17 0.55% generation 5 ipod

Almost one third of the searches that terminate at my site are looking for Hawaiian flowers? I need to change the subject matter I post about I guess 🙂

The Gizmo Project

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t go online much), you’ve probably heard of Skype, but have you heard of the Gizmo Project? If not, check it out. It is very similar to Skype in concept, but it has one big difference: it is standards based.

It is built by the SIPphone.com folks, so when you register you’ll get a SIP telephone number as well as your username. That means that people using other SIP phones, even on other networks in many cases since they peer with each other, can also call you, and vice-versa.

Although the software itself is still in beta, it seems pretty stable on the Mac at least. Since the network underneath it is very stable, the call quality is great. I have made computer-to-computer calls and a transatlantic call from San Francisco to the UK.

So, download it and try it out (you get $0.25 of free credits so you can test call-out calls too). If you do try it, call me (Gizmo name: john94501). I don’t have it on at work yet (the Linux client is still in development), but leave me a message and I’ll call you back 🙂

Podcasts

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For a few weeks now I’ve been exploring the world of podcasts. My initial reaction to this technology was simple: why would anybody listen to these things? I have found some though that are worth listening to.

Today, Apple added support for podcasts to iTunes. While this is probably a negative step for the iPodder and iPodderX projects, having support in one of the main audio software packages can only make podcast listening more widespread. By the way, those two packages do have additional features over the iTunes podcast support, and are worth checking out if you become really addicted to these things.

So, what are the podcasts that I’ve been listening too? Well, This Week in Tech and the Engadget podcast are the two that I’ve listened to more than one episode of. I am exploring some more from the iTunes podcast directory now (first up are Linux News Log, Inside Mac Radio and the Linux Links Tech Show)

Image Use

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Looking in my site statistics, which I do occasionally, I discovered that a couple of people over at myspace.com are using images from my site without any credit. So, now those two images have copyright overlays. I’m not bothered by people using the images from my site on their personal sites, but please give me, or my site, a credit for the image.

New Look

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Finally the trackback spam became too annoying forcing me to update to WordPress 1.5 (I had been putting that off as I hate any kind of upgrades to things like that). In doing so, I gained the new ‘default’ theme which I kind of liked, but not quite, so I tweaked it! Let me know what you think.

Then I installed the Spam Karma 2.0 plugin. We’ll see over the next few days how that works against the spammers. They have over the last week or so switched to being all trackbacks. When they were mostly regular comment spam, Kitten’s Spaminator was doing a good job of keeping them at bay. Unfortunately, it didn’t check trackback spam. Spam Karma does, so hopefully that will keep them out.

Spriggs Photoblog

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Check out Grif’s (relatively) new photoblog. For a long time he has been posting photos mixed in with his other posts to his main blog. Now he has separated the photos out into their own blog, and he manages to post a new shot pretty much every day (which is many more than I manage). I liked today’s one (shown on the right), but that’s probably not a surprise given my own current fascination with macro shots of flowers and other plants.

blueDonkey.org Photo Galleries

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The more observant reader might have noticed the link to the blueDonkey.org galleries appear in the links list to the left. Now though I have a few more photos in there (most of which have been seen on the blog already). In future though I suspect more photos will appear in the galleries than appear here.

From a technical viewpoint, the galleries are powered by Singapore which I found while looking for a PHP/MySQL based photo gallery solution that also allowed a lot of control over the presentation. Singapore has both style sheet based presentation and very configurable templates. In its most recent version it also has MySQL support for all the metadata associated with the photos. That means that all kinds of smart galleries are potentially possible in the future (e.g. galleries generated based on camera used or location).