Teknovis

I just read that Skype is considering the use of SIP in Skype Opens Up To SIP, Finally Eyes Enterprise Customers The Way It Should. (For an explanation of SIP see Session Initiation Protocol.) The main motivation of this would be to bring Skype to the business community. (Although in my experience Skype is already used extensively by both small and large businesses.)

Skype currently uses a propitiatory protocol to exchange VoIP data, and this protocol masquerades as HTTPS. SIP is a mature open standard for VoIP, and therefore there are already many compliant hardware and software solutions.

In general, I am a big fan of open standards. However, in this case I think that the biggest advantage of SIP is also its biggest disadvantage. In particular, because SIP is an open standard is is very easy to identify it on the network, and treat it differently. The advantage of this is that VoIP traffic can be given higher priority. The disadvantage is that VoIP traffic can easily be blocked :( I have experienced Internet connections in many hotels that block all outgoing traffic except HTTP and HTTPS. In these situations Skype still works perfectly :)

If Skype can successfully incorporate SIP functionality without compromising on the existing propitiatory protocol over HTTPS then I think that would be a great solution!

Tags: HTTP, SIP, Skype

I came across a really nice online photo editor today called Pixenate that is developed by a company called Sxoop Technologies. Perhaps the thing that I find most impressive about it is that it is written entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The user interface is really smooth, and it is very easy to use due to the helpful tips. There are plenty of editing tools to satisfy most requirements, although some of them seemed to be slow to update the photo. I do not know what caused this, because my CPU was certainly not the bottleneck.  I also really like the way that each time you load the web page there is a new default image to experiment with!

The interface is so nice that I had to include a screenshot (click it to see a larger version). However, this is not a substitute for playing with it ;)

Pixenate Screenshot

I am not really clear who are the intended users of the software, because I think that most serious photographers will use desktop applications to edit their digital photos. Perhaps the software would be a good addition to photo printing web sites such as PhotoBox.

Tags: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PhotoBox, Pixenate, Sxoop Technologies

Today I got an email with no body and a winmail.dat attachment from somebody. The reason that the email was in this format is because the sender used Outlook. This really annoys me, because I use a variety of email clients, and none of them can use this format! Grrr… For more information about this file format see Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format.

Anyway, today I found a really nice web site for converting these files into the original files. It is very easy to use, and it produced my converted files instantly! The web site is Winmaildat.com Enjoy!

Tags: Email

I previously wrote about the demise of Windows 3.11 in Goodbye Windows 3.11!. I have not used in it many years, so this news did not concern me.

However, I still regularly use Windows 2000 because it does everything that I need. It also gives much better performance on older computers than its successor Windows XP.

I have been thinking recently about how popular Windows 2000 remains. I started thinking about this after reading an article describing how the UK’s Royal Navy has started using a mix of Windows 2000 and Windows XP on its nuclear powered submarines. This is instead of the traditional custom designed software. The full article is Royal Navy completes Windows for Submarines™ rollout.

During the Christmas holidays I was in several airports, and I was in many department stores. I was really surprised to see that many of the computers in these locations (boarding gates and customer information desks) were using Windows 2000. It is easy to spot this when the computers are not being used, because both the login screen and the default screensaver of Windows 2000 are distinctive.

It must be the case that the benefits of using the newer operating systems do not yet justify the massive additional costs of upgrading so many computers.

Tags: UK, Windows 2000, Windows 3.11, Windows XP

A friend recently brought this great video by CollegeHumor to my attention:

Enjoy!

Tags: CollegeHumor, Windows XP

News about the latest security issue in Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer has made it into mainstream media, such as Security alert over Internet Explorer and Serious security flaw found in IE. More details about the security issue can be read in MS issues brown alert over unpatched IE 7 flaw and Microsoft issues emergency patch warning for IE.

I think it is great that users are being encouraged to switch to other browsers! Internet Explorer has been far too dominant for too long. I think that this caused browser innovation to be stifled.

It is times like this that make me feel happy to use Firefox :) Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that it never suffers from security issues!

Tags: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft

The BBC is well known for its in-depth, and meticulous, reporting in articles. It is one of these articles that caught my attention this morning… Indeed, I would go as far as to say it was the most interesting article that I read all week!

The article I am referring to is How do avatars have sex?, and it provides a fascinating insight into how avatars have sex in Second Life! The beginning of the process is:

First you need to buy genitals

I can see why this step is important, but it is not something that I would have thought of before reading the article! Just as in real life, these come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colours. The article then describes how the new purchase can be used:

You can touch and jiggle about a bit and you can emote and gesture in a way the other person would see

The article then goes on the explain the full process, for those of you who are interested ;)

Wow – I really never expected to be writing about sex on this blog (or indeed any blog)! I wonder if sex will become the most clicked tag in my tag cloud ;)

Tags: Avatar, BBC, Second Life, Sex

I got an email this morning advertising a free event in Dublin tomorrow for Drupal users and developers.

The full event details can be found in Drupal Ireland Meeting – Dublin.

Tags: Drupal

There seems to be differing opinions on how Categories and Tags should be used within WordPress. So now that I some experience with both of these I have decided to go with the following principles:

• I am using Categories as very high-level descriptors, like chapters in a book.
• I am using Tags as precise pointers, like the index in a book.

Consequently, the number of Tags is likely to grow very large, and it is likely that a substantial number of these Tags will only be used once. So I will keep this under review.

The Tag Cloud shows a maximum of 45 Tags by default, as described in the wp_tag_cloud() documentation. However, this can easily be increased to any maximum number using a parameter.

I had expected that I could parametrise wp_tag_cloud() as part of my theme, but I could not find any way to do this!

Instead I had to modify one of the WordPress PHP files. There appeared to be two approaches:

• Modify wp_includes/category-template.php as described in this WordPress Support thread.
• Modify wp-includes/widgets.php as described in Modifying the WordPress Tag Cloud Widget Font Size. (Be careful of the incorrect apostrophe character!)

I am not sure what the relative advantages and disadvantages of these approaches are, but I chose the second one.

Tags: PHP, WordPress

I have now started using pretty URLs for my permalinks. This took me a long time to get working, but I have to admit that this was my own fault :o

Configuring permalinks within WordPress is straight-forward, and it is described in Using Permalinks.

My problems occurred because WordPress could not create the required .htaccess file due to the way that Blacknight has installed WordPress in a different directory to the one that appears in the URL.

In trying to solve my problems, I learned a lot about .htaccess files! I thought that these Stupid htaccess Tricks were very useful.

Everything appears to be working perfectly now, but there is still one thing that I do not understand. My .htaccess file contains the following three lines:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

There are many pages, such as htaccess rewrite code explanation, that describe these three lines. It is the explanation for the third line that confuses me:

Rewrites any request with 1 or more characters to /index.php, which launches wordpress and handles all redirections and what to display.

Firstly, the RewriteRule documentation states that the matched pattern is replaced with the substitution string. Furthermore, the Regular Expression documentation states that the period will match any single character! So what exactly is happening here?

Secondly, how does it rewrite the request to /index.php? Is it appended to the URL, or is it sent as a POST variable?

Tags: Blacknight, htacess, Permalinks, WordPress