Found this link in the http://thisweekintech.com/ show notes (and heard about it on the podcast episode 24).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050921-5337.html
Although I don’t play World of Warcraft, I think that’s just a fantastic twist to the game.
NTL bill double for broadband
Ok, it’s not quite as bad as the title makes out.. well actually, yes, I guess it is.
Just had the NTL bill through for this month and it’s about 50% more than normal – the reason for this is that they’ve decided to go from billing 1 month in arrears for broadband to 1 month in advance the same as the phoneline rental. I can see there’s a certain logic to this, but doing it without any warning (that I saw anyway) and charging both months in the one bill is a bit much. It would have been better, although perhaps a little more complicated at their end, if they’d split the extra months payment across two months, going 2 weeks in advance the first month and then the full month in advance after that.
VOIP, Voice Over IP
I’ve been playing around with a few voice over IP products for my powerbook just recently and it has to be said that some of them are pretty good.
I tried iChat AV as that seemed like the obvious choice because it comes free with Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) and since I tried it a few times for AIM and Jabber instant messaging it was already setup with a few friends that I could try calling. Unfortunately, the VOIP part seems limited to those who have iChat AV themselves (makes sense), but also you have to be using an AIM login – just using Jabber alone doesn’t seem to let you place calls. I guess this is probably because you can use any Jabber server you want and there’s no way that Apple could guarantee that the server you use is compatible. Call quality was pretty acceptable over a cable modem and it didn’t drop out unexpectedly.
I gave Skype a miss because although it’s encrypted traffic (which is good), it’s a proprietary protocol so you have to use Skype at both ends. Oh, and the company was recently acquired by eBay so there’s no telling what might happen.
Hurricane Season
It seems the south east coast of America is getting a bit of a hammering from storms at the moment. We had Hurricane Katrina at the end of August which devastated New Orleans and now it seems that Hurricane Rita is about to hit Texas around the Houston area within the next few days and if it keeps up in strength until then apparently it’ll be as bad as Hurricane Katrina.
iChat AV through Linux NAT
This assumes the following conditions:
* the Linux gateway is forwards all outgoing traffic after rewriting the source address as the external IP (i.e NAT)
* the incoming policy is to drop all packets unless they’re related to an existing connection.
* Both clients are running iChat AV (comes with Mac OSX Tiger)
* Both clients have AIM accounts.
To allow an external user to contact someone on the internal network, simply add the following rules to the Linux gateway.
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp –dport 16384:16403 -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp –dport 5060 -j ACCEPT
Once this is done, you should be able to make and receive audio and video calls with iChat AV. I’ve not tested it with multiple clients on the internal network talking to multiple clients externally, but it works for one-to-one chats.
I also have the ip_conntrack kernel module loaded, this might make a difference as well.
Stock images for free
Just found a link to http://sxc.hu/ – stock.xchng – whilst trying to find some stuff on CSS and layouts. Also another site that I’ll be looking into is http://www.sitepoint.com/ which has a fair bit about CSS layout. Not sure I’ll buy the book that’s on there, but maybe I’ll get a different book from Amazon or somewhere since I’ve not bought a book for a month or so.
Interesting use of Google maps
Looking for a new house? Check out On One Map – very clever. Thanks to Andy for the link.
Fixing software RAID
The primary drive failed in one of my servers – luckily since it was using mirrored drives the system carried on running until I could get PoundHost to replace it.
However, since it was the primary drive when it was replaced the system wouldn’t boot and they had to use a rescue cd. Here’s what was done to fix it…
Geek or not?
Found Graeme‘s nerd test score in the Planet NottsLUG archive from back at the start of September. Took it (click the button below for your chance) and sorry Graeme, you’re not as big a geek as me (but is that something to be proud of?)
iPod waking up on its own
Sitting here in front of the laptop the last couple of nights I’ve noticed that for no apparent reason my iPod wakes up and the screen goes bright for a few seconds before going back to sleep again. At first I thought there was something on the clickwheel but it’s been propped up on the desk with nothing anywhere near it. The wheel was even locked so in theory it shouldn’t have mattered anyway!
I suspected it last night but tonight it did the same thing again – I found that it happens as the clock changes over from 23:59 to 00:00 each night. I don’t have any idea why it does that though, very strange.