Don’t know why it took me so long to think of doing this, but now we are on iinet VOIP (over naked DSL) at home, I realised that I could install a softphone on my laptop and make/recieve calls that way. Sure beats hunting around the house for the cordless handset my wife keeps hiding.

I tried the Telephone program (for OS X). It is bare bones, but seems to work just fine.

My configuration settings looked like this:

Basic account settings

Advanced account settings

I don’t think full name matters, but User Name is your iinet VOIP (phone) number.
Password is your VOIP password.
And Domain is your SIP domain.
But you also need to add your SIP Server as the Server in the Advanced settings (and tick the “Connect Using Proxy” tick box).

I had to disable the account (untick the “Use This Account” tick box) before I could edit the advanced settings. Thanks for this tip stepwallace on the Telephone Wiki

Once all that was done, the thing works fine. It can find phone numbers right out of Address Book. In the absence of a “Call” button, I found you just hit the Enter key to make a call. It even pauses iTunes when you get an incomming call.

It’s light on features, but I’m happy

EDIT: This just gets better. VOIP works from my laptop when I’m at work, so I can make and receive home phone calls while at work
I don’t know if I actually will do such a thing. But that’s not the point. I CAN do it. THAT’S the point.

I saw this in a blog post recently (If I can remember where, I’ll post the link) and it’s just one of those thing that are so bloody obvious after somebody points it out to you that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. At least I did

When writing comment blocks (in any language that uses C style comments, including PHP), try this pattern…

/*
stuff to comment out
//*/

That way, you can uncomment the entire block just by adding a leading slash, like this…

//*
stuff to comment out
//*/

I believe in the small tablet device. Apples iSlate, or whatever it will be called, is the way of the future. Or maybe the Microsoft Courier, or… whatever. I think a small, portable device, that does not try to be a full blown computer, is the way of the future.

I have been drawn to the idea of such devices for a long time. Perhaps it’s from watching/reading too much sci-fi. There was some British sci-fi show called Star Cops. I saw it in the late 80s. Some UK cop gets posted on the moon to help sort out local crime. It was an understated show with few fx, but the cop had a little box thing (called “Box”), about the size of a paperback book, that contained an AI that was his personal assistant. It would so research on his behalf and book flights (to the moon and back) for him. It would answer phone calls and take messages if he was busy. I loved the idea.

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Don’t forget that the Button element in HTML has a default action that is “submit”.

I did. And it took me ages to work out why my page kept submitting until I realised I had to set the “type” attribute to “button”.

Last year, during the bush fires here in Victoria, I spent a bit of time watching the CFA web site for updates. My wife made the comment that it would be realy nice if you could see where the fires were (at the time, there was no map on the site).

It seemed an easy enough job, so I started working on parsing the CFA RSS feed and then linking to Google maps to show where the fires are.

But the fires were over before I finished the job, and since then it’s languished in my pile of projects that would be nice to finish if I had the time. And now it’s fire season again and I was thinking I really do need to get that site done soon.

I just had a look at the CFA site to see if anything had changed, and now they have maps. Guess I was too slow

Time to archive the code and move on to the next little project.

A few weeks prior to going to Syndey for Web Directions South ’09, my MacBook Pro died

One night I was using it. I shut it down and put it in my bag. At work the next day I turned it on and … nothing happened. Completely blank (black) screen. I angsted over it for a while, then called the shop I bought it from. It was still under warranty, so I couriered it  to them.

A week passed. I got a call that the machine was ready. Half an hour later they called back to say it wasn’t. The new parts they had put in (logic board and optical drive) failed some last minute test. They would have to order more parts. Best case was the laptop would be ready on Tuesday. I had tickets to fly to Sydney on Wednesday.

So I waited.

Tuesday come and still no call from the techs. When I called them they explained that the guy working on my laptop was sick. There was no way it would be ready before I went to Sydney

At lunch time on Tuesday, I jumped on a tram and rode down to MSY computing in North Melbourne and bought a eeePC (1000HA).

After my experience with the Asus netbook I bought for the kids, I was prepared for the worst. But the machine exceeded all my expectations. I quickly abused the work bandwidth and ran all the Windows updates, and installed a few apps.

The next day I flew to Sydney.

The eeePC did such a good job. Battery life is less than advertised, by it did survive a whole day of twittering and note taking at the conference (thanks also to the free wireless there). Didn’t have it running all the time of course, but it still impressed me.

Now that I’m back in Melbourne, my MacBook has finally been returned to me. I’ve decided that the Mac can be my home computer for now on. I suspect that being dragged to work and back every day had something to do with it’s break down. And the new eeePC does what I need it to do at work (browse the web )

Last year I attended the Web Directions UX event in Melbourne and I promised myself that I would make it to Web Directions South this year.

I managed to keep that promise and I’m glad I did.

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I have a goofy little app I wrote as me-ware, but published in the vane hope that somebody else might find it useful. It’s just a simple dice roller for use in a role playing game I’m running online. I released it, but never promoted it anywhere, and predictably it received no traffic apart from myself.

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Another loose end that I felt deserved it’s own post is a follow up from the ignite thing I did.

Did I mention that I was nervous that night? I seriously wonder if I managed to make my point at all. But this post is here to clear that up.

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I have some loose ends to tidy up.

The last Twitter Code Challenge was a bust. I didn’t promote it very well, and going on holiday in the middle of it didn’t help. In the end, nobody submitted anything before the deadline. I didn’t even get to write my own code for the challenge. Not that I was going to compete against myself, but I don’t like releasing a challenge without at least showing that it’s doable by myself. I had an idea about injecting a canvas element into the page and using some kind of fractal algorithm to draw a Mandelbrot set in it. So the loose end is this: There was no winner. I still have the books, but for now, the challenge is not on.

In my Highs and Lows post from the 2nd of April. I did talk to Zazz about the SSD and they pointed out that there was in fact a little asterisk next to the “16 GB SSD” which lead to an explanation that 16 was in fact an actual 8GB solid state drive, and 8GB SD card.. Wikipaedia explains SSD as “a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data.” It also implies that flash memory can be considered “solid state”. So their 8+8 could be called 16GB SSD, if you squint at it. I feel ripped off, and I firmly believe that Zazz was being deceptive in their marketing of this product, but it’s a hard case to argue, and in the end probably not worth it. Lesson learnt: read the fine print.

The Acer Aspire is still kicking, but it struggles to do anything in a timely manner. It’s such an old model that I doubt it’s still available anywhere, but just in  case anyone is thinking about buying one, I’d seriously suggest they look at other models from other manufacturers first. The kids still like it.