Hosting News
There have been a lot of good developments for AffordIT lately, the rollout of DotNetPanel on the IIS server being the most notable. The hosted clients will be pleased to know that we are about 2 steps away from offering true DIY hosting account management thru a .NET interface via a browser.
Digsby… The KILLER Comm App?
Digsby is shaping up to be the next KILLER unified communication application in my toolbox. I had be a fan on Trillian Basic for quite some time, I had grown to accept the loss of certain features for the ability to manage all my IM accounts in one location. Digbsy improves on that by adding email and all the major Social Networks (Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) to its interface. And it does all these things surprisingly well. A few glitches here and there but overall, I am definitely digging it as a new communications tool. I may even take the plunge and setup my Exchange2007 account using IMAP or POP3/SMTP in place of MAPI and RPC over HTTPs on the desktop running Digsby… See if I can’t divorce myself from Microsoft a little bit more and embrace FOSS on the that testbed machine.
The Shell Game… Is Windows all it’s cracked up to be?
I am yet another IT Consultant with a deep seated loathing of VISTA. None of my 7 desktops or laptops run VISTA, all of them are running XP SP3. I actually installed Vista x64 on one desktop and removed it less than a day later (NOTE: this was more due to poor OEM driver implementations than anything with VISTA), plus I have 2 VL Keys for a total of 20 users but I WILL NOT RUN IT!
I had held out hope for Windows 7, that it would be THE OS that would bring me back to embrace Redmond’s cutting edge of OS offerings… Sadly, that probably won’t happen until after Windows 7 is RTM… Why?
Answer: You need to be running Vista SP1 to install the Windows 7 Beta Upgrade… Epic failing on the Windows 7 Development Team to push out a beta version of a product that has a baseline requirement of an OS that most IT people do not like!!!
Instead, I have been embracing the “alternate shell” concept… Installation of replacements for Windows Explorer Shell, and Emerge Desktop has come to be quite the contender for my desktop GUI needs. Coupling it with a few other freely available utilities, it makes for a much different user experience… So far, less crash prone than XP but not quite a forgiving when recovering from shell crashes. More on that at a later date….
OPERATION MEDIA CENTER
I have been tring to ride the wave of “Unification” for years, TV as a integral part of the computing experience has been a pet project of mine… I was exploring the HTPC concept as early as WebTV for Windows when it was a component released with Windows 98. Thanks to Microsoft and some hardware vendors, this journey has been a VERY painful (yet educating) experience.
I really wish hardware vendors (AMD and ATI come to mind) would keep their drivers available to their product owners. I understand that as hardware and software evolve, things become obsolete and/or outdated… But sometimes things work a certain way and only that certain way, so upgrading or replacing are not always options. ATI All-In-Wonder video cards are a GOOD example of that. ATI cards have been able to do TV for 10 years now. After Windows XP, it has become a major pain to get it working successfully if you are not running one of their latest cards and driver combinations. AMD has decided that the older drivers and utilties SHOULD NOT BE MADE AVAILABLE TO CONSUMERS. This is probably serves two purposes, it keeps the driver development team focused on the newer products while reducing support needs and it also drives the sales of newer hardware since people are finding that their video cards ARE NOT fully compatible with XP (or VISTA)
In trying to avoid the unnecessary pains of upgrading my Media Center PC, I kicked around several alternative Media Center apps… Media Portal really wanted to be the one… could NOT deliver a GUI or TV though (NOTE: I fault the ATI Drivers and DirectX for this problem not Media Portal!!!)! J River was a contender except it was utterly not User Friendly and Commercial Software as well… SesamTV came the closest, like 99.5% of the way there… But it all boiled down to a little matter of the Filter Graph pin not connecting for TV Audio (The TV Crossbar Graph would NOT connect the Output pin to the Input pin of the Audio Filter. I could make the connection manually using GraphEdit with SeasamTV running and the IFilter.Graph present but I could not see a way to make the change a persistent one!)
So it back to the drawing board and that means a new video card… I have an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder on the way. it’s an AGP card so I’ll have to pull the Duron based PCIx motherboard in the HTPC computer, I’ll end up relacing that with a CedarMill P4 on an ASUS Board… Hopefully XP MCE will not throw a fit when it comes time to update and install all the necessary drivers to make the motherboard video card switch)
HTC, GSM VOIP and WM6… Or How I learned to cook ROMS!
I have been a huge fan of my HTC devices… I have 2 HTC Wizards (a G3 Wizard running Faria’s WM6 and a G4 Wizard running the the Faria WM6 ROM), I only have 1 SIM Card (my wife and I have 2 SIM’s but she is not quite yet ready to embrace the PDA phone as her friend… she JUST discovered the joys of a Bluetooth headset this Christmas!!!), so I have been researching how to get VOIP working on my G4 over a certificate based WPA encrypted WIFI connection to the LAN.
I can say, without XDA Developers, none of this would be possible… This site is THE site for people who have HTC phones running Windows Mobile! The HTC 8125 or Wizard, was never given the joys of Windows Mobile Version 6… We were relegated to remain in the dark ages using WM5… Thanks to the superb software/romware chefs over at XDA, that is no longer the case… The developers and tweakers on that site have unlocked nearly every mystery of the internals of these phones and their operating systems. I started out with a single Cingular 8125 running a stock WM5 ROM, which became a very functional Wizard running a custom cooked fork of the Faria WM6 ROM…
I received my 2nd Wizard, a G3 Cingular phone, last year from a former coworker who was throwing it out because it was “bricked” and no longer usable (or so he thought!!!). After CID and SIM unlocking the fone, I threw a vanilla T-Mobile 2.25 ROM on it… Then proceeded to upgrade it to Faria’s WM6 ROM (which includes all the necesarry tweaks to get SIP calling working) and began trying to setup a VOIP connection to a clients SIP provider (in this case, Aretta Communications)
Aretta should work, it’s nothing more than SIP via Asterik/FreePBX… The cleint is using Grandstream VOIP phones and other than the occasional hiccup, they work beautifully. Sadly, I have NOT been able to get all the SIP configuration information… Their SIP reseller is being guarded about giving out key settings and account info (I suspect he realizes his days as the account reseller are numbered!)… So rather than belabor the issue and wait for all the necessary info, I decided to go off (half-cocked of course!!!) and see if I could get the G3 Wizard setup to make and receive VOIP calls.
[At this point in my Blog I'm going to stop for the day, the remainder of my experiences with the setup of SIP calling on WM6 led to some "oopses" on my part and made for a VERY LATE night and a VERY CRANKY wife! All because I (un)successfully managed to hose my GSM radio settings on my G4 Wizard, as well as not getting SIP working on either the G3 OR G4 Wizards, while at the same time causing my Grandstream phone to not register with the SIP Server... As well as (can you say, insult to injury?) causing all outbound SIP connections to fail to the SIP Server (YAY, I really broke it good!).... Of course, my wife wanted to know why during all of this "I didn't take the time to call her to tell her what was going on!"... So needless to say, I'm in the hot seat over pulling a late nighter... But I did get ALMOST everything back to normal... G4 connects to the GSM network, the SIP phones are working again (suspect this was a DHCP or ARP issue!), the G3 can connect to a different SIP Provider (VOIPCheap.com).... Now I just need to get the G.729 Codec working so that the G4 won't be consuming so much bandwicth for calls... another night, after the dust has settled perhaps!]
