Saturday, December 24, 2005

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Shall the joy oh His birth to enlight your souls!

I know that it sounds quite conventional but in fact this hollydays is about His birth.
We might have forgotten the true meaning of this as we are daily assaulted by Christmas publicity asking as to buy and give presents that are not for our souls but for our stomaches.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Team!


My team: AI, AAU, DIU, CNA, IGN, TPA and me on the bottom.


Others from SRP: PRU, TPA, Me, SRD, SCA, CTU.

Thursday, December 8, 2005

SIP Everywhere

I am amazed on how fast Sip is developing and how many things are growing with it.

http://is2.antd.nist.gov/proj/iptel/
http://www.mobicents.org/

Sunday, December 4, 2005

Linux vs. FreeBSD

I had recently downloaded and used FreeBSD 6. I felt a little bit clumsy in the beginning but then I found it to be okay. I addapted myself relly fast with the slight different syntax of the parameters in BSD and, hourray, it worked like a charm.
In the meantime I have had some bad experiences with FedoraCore 4 that proved to be buggy during install, full of unwanted/untested/unnecessary/buggy packages. Since RedHat 6.2 - the best ever Linux distribution. I believe that that all other RPM based distributions are a big step backwards. I am still wondeing why as long as Debian and gentoo are going nicely ahead. I am hopping for a better release of FC...

I have found thoug some nice things:
1. OpenSolaris + NexentaOS - http://www.opensolaris.org
2. AuroraLinux - I will try it on my old SpacStation Classic.

Time saving tools

I found that I can spare about 2 hours daily using the following tools:
1. OmeaReader
2. Google Desktop
3. Mozilla Firefox
4. Rainlendar
5. 1GB Sandisk Cruzer

Thursday, December 1, 2005

Almost free world?

Yes I know, I haven' wrote for a very long time although I promised it. That's life....
I discovered yesterday that almost everything can be done almost for free. I was shocked. I am not referrin here to minor things but to things that are really expensive. For example:

1. VIDEO STREAMING
Take for example thesolution DarwinStreamingServer + MPEG4IP + ImToo or VLC => in no time I can create a powerfull enough streaming server thatcould support hundreds of streams even on my not so powerfull machine. OK. In order to make it a commercial grade solutin what I have to so? I have to invest about 2000 EUR in a Apple XServe G5 and in some bandwith from a decent ISP and I have a good VOD server. If I could talk to a wireless operator I could offer him a cheap/pretty powerfull solution for streaming. If not I will keep the ideea as a hobby. BTW: Proprietary solutions cost well over 20000 EUR.

2. TELEPHONY
The catch here is VoIP. Especially SIP. There are many solutions that could be used to talk for free. I am not reffering here to Yahoo, SkyPE, GoogleTalk or so bu to a custom based solution. AsteriskPBX + X-lite(or any other SIP phone - even hardware as ZyXel). In a couple of hours of configuration and tests I was able to create a working solution that enabled me to talk to my friends. Add to this a E1/SS7 interface and you will be able to create a goood solution for a company. Not the best, but very near to a commercial grade one. Add alsoa wireless router and some WiFi phones and you could use it to provide voice to distant/hardly accesible spots.
If we add to this also som IM features we are in heaven.

3. Software Defined Radio
This is WOW! Just imagine how nice it would be to transform my PC - a junk -into a UMTS/GSM/anything immaginable radio/tv using only a cheap board... GNU Radio Project is great...

If you don't believe me check those out:
1. Darwin Streaming Server - http://www.apple.com/quicktime/streamingserver/
2. Video Lan Client - http://www.videolan.org/streaming/
3. Mpeg 4 IP - http://www.mpeg4ip.net
4. Asterisk PBX - http://www.asterisk.org/
5. SIP Express Router - http://www.iptel.org/ser/
6. YATE - http://yate.null.ro


A plethora of information can be found at:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/