Tag Archives: Software
jQuery UI: Widgets, Components, and Interactions
Posted on 17. Sep, 2007
Looks promising.
http://ui.jquery.com/...
LightWindow
Posted on 15. Sep, 2007
LightWindow is a fabulous hack (rewrite!) of Lightbox. I have implemented this on my site, using it to display embedded YouTube clips and showing the Flickr Slideshow without leaving my site. Lets you display any type of media, image, Flash or page in the LightWindow. Super stable and compatible, highly recommended. Checkout some of the samples of the authors site.
http://www.stickmanlabs.com/...
floAt’s Mobile Agent
Posted on 16. Aug, 2007
Great mobile phone management application. Works well with Bluetooth and my Sony Ericsson W880i, has proximity events and scripting capabilities. Great for reading and replying to text messages on your PC. Proximity can be set to lock your PC when you walk away from your desk. Nice alternative to Sailing Clicker and BluePhoneElite on the Mac. Highly recommended.
http://fma.sourceforge.net/...
Facebook Developers Garage London
Posted on 16. Aug, 2007
Attended the first Facebook Developers Garage event in London last night. Great turnout, maybe 200 people. Interesting mix of developers with launched or in the works Facebook applications, and then loads of "entrepreneurs" with ideas running around desperate for developers. Definitely a lucrative market opportunity here to cash in on companies looking to build applications on the Facebook platform. Facebook should crack one million London users in the next couple of weeks.
http://www.facebook.com/...
App(s)aholic
Posted on 16. Aug, 2007
Checkout Appaholic and Appsaholic. Two nice Facebook application trackers.
17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards
Posted on 11. Feb, 2007
Good list.
http://joltawards.com/...
Google Local for mobile
Posted on 21. Jan, 2006
Google Local for mobile provides mapping and satellite images via a J2ME app on your mobile phone or BlackBerry. Its a very neat implementation and reasonably fast considering all the map imagery comes down over GPRS. This is a good alternative to the popular J2MEMAP which has provided J2ME access to GoogleMaps for a while now (and now also MSN Virtual Earth). Neat download, highly recommended, watch your GPRS usage though.
http://www.google.com/...
Windows Live Ideas
Posted on 21. Jan, 2006
Microsoft's answer to Google Labs? Some mildly interesting things here from a Google copy cat view point, including Local.
http://ideas.live.com/...
Asterisk and Bluetooth repost
Posted on 02. Sep, 2005
Just wanted to bump my three recent posts on Asterisk PBX and Bluetooth presence to the top again:
VoIP, SIP, IAX, Asterisk and Bluetooth Presence
Asterisk mobile VoIP
More Bluetooth presence fun
Asterisk mobile VoIP
Posted on 01. Sep, 2005
There's another feature I included in my Asterisk PBX config that I forgot to mention. At any of the IVR prompts, and also directly through one of my personal 0845 PSTN direct-in-dial numbers I can call my Asterisk box and access all the VoIP functions remotely. In extensions.conf I have a hidden extension (pin) defined which then includes my home-context dial plans. Essentially turning my mobile phone or whatever phone I happen to dailing from into an extension on the PBX. From there I can dial through any of the VoIP providers I'm peered with and also make PSTN calls via VoIP or out the BT trunk. This is great for making international calls on my mobile via VoIP without having to make the international call directly at 10x the cost.
On a related note, Skype users should download the 1.4 beta released yesterday which now includes the option to forward calls to mobile or land line phones via SkypeOut if you're not online. Nice.
VoIP, SIP, IAX, Asterisk and Bluetooth Presence
Posted on 30. Aug, 2005
I've been playing with the Linux open sourced Asterisk PBX software for the past couple of weeks, it's really quite an impressive package. I've got Asterisk linked with a Sipura SPA-3000. The Sipura provides the PSTN inbound and outbound trunk to the Asterisk (via SIP) and also acts as an ATA so I can use the Panasonic cordless as an IP phone. The Asterisk handles SIP and IAX registrations, call routing and voice mail. The great thing about Asterisk is that any combination of inbound and outbound providers, dial rules, hard and soft phone extensions, call forwarding, ivr menu prompts and more can be easily defined. The initial configuration is daunting at first, but once you get the hang of the key files sip.conf, iax.conf and extensions.conf the possibilities are endless.
I have Sipgate, Sipphone, FWD, Gossiptel and Oztell SIP peers and users defined, and a VoIPtalk IAX2 peer. I have three free PSTN direct-in-dials in the UK, and a Sydney direct-in-dial 02 number from Oztell for less that AUD$5 per month. The nice thing is that any inbound call rings the cordless phone in our flat in London rather than relying on a PC soft phone. The local Sydney number is a nice touch too, allowing friends and family to ring us from home for the cost of a local call and it rings directly through to the flat in London.
Using the extensions.conf you can define any number of dialing routes and codes. For example PSTN calls to Australia are transparently routed to Sipgate, where as local London and mobile calls switch to the PSTN trunk on the Sipura and go out via our normal BT line.
Inbound calls can ring on multiple extensions and each inbound call can be handled in a different way. Another extremely cool feature is creating interactive voice response applications. I've set it up so if any inbound IP or PSTN call is not answered you're taken to a IVR menu where you can press 1 or 2 to divert to one of our mobiles or press 3 to leave a voice mail. The diversion to mobile is routed over IAX2 rather than SIP to VoIPtalk, which is much more reliable for quickly and reliably initiating calls over NAT. The diversion to mobile is the same whether the call was inbound from VoIP or PSTN. The inbuilt voice mail server is quite good too.
Possibly the coolest feature though is linking Asterisk to Bluetooth presence! I have a cron script that grep's for the MAC address of my mobile phone on Bluetooth every 5 minutes. If I'm home, through my Linux box detecting my Bluetooth mobile, any incoming VoIP or PSTN calls ring the home phone. If I'm out, through the Linux box being not able to detect my Bluetooth mobile, it will forward the call via VoIPtalk and ring my mobile. All this logic takes place in the extensions.conf where an incoming call runs initially runs an AGI script (Bash), which then returns a variable anthonyhome=yes or anthonyhome=no and then the appropriate diversions take place, all in about 5 seconds.
Asterisk is really quite amazing, and purrs on a low spec 733MHz Celeron sharing resources with several other servers and a couple of X sessions running on the same box. I can't recommend Asterisk and a Sipura box more highly as an excellent geek VoIP project.
http://www.asterisk.org/...
More Bluetooth presence fun
Posted on 30. Aug, 2005
After initially getting Bluetooth working with automatic dial plan changes in Asterisk, I've linked Bluetooth presence event changes to a range of neat little tasks and spoken messages. I run a cron script every 5 minutes which grep's for the MAC address of mobile phone and then triggers off a number of tasks if detected or not. For example, when I leave for work in the morning, the script will detect that I have left and log an away time stamp. It will continue to poll every 5 minutes for my phone. When I get home several hours later and my phone is detected my status is changed to "home" in Asterisk PBX and on the anthonyjhicks.com Real-Time Tracker. The script then compiles a comprehensive welcome message to be spoken using Festival TTS. It calculates my time away, polls for waiting emails and voicemails, and checks TV shows recorded by GB-PVR. For example, within 5 minutes of getting home from work, I'll hear the following message spoken through the speakers on my Linux box:
My Bluetooth presence continues to be used the entire time I'm home, for example every time a TV program is recorded by GB-PVR, it will announce:
Where-as if my Bluetooth presence is not detected, it saves up the list of recorded shows until it detects my presence again and then plays back the list as above.
I plan to add more Bluetooth presence events, but for now automatic call diversion changes, web status, voice and email messages waiting, and an away time calculation is a nice start. Super geeky. All of this is home grown code, I'll post the scripts at some point.
anthonyjhicks.com Job Logs
Posted on 03. Mar, 2005
I'm unusually obsessed with automation, redundancy, monitoring and backups at the moment, I've got over 50 daily scheduled tasks that handle a whole range of things including automated quadruple backups of my personal files and photos across four different servers, to the various bots that keep aussieblogs ticking over. One of things I setup a few months back was a job logger. It's basically a database of all my automated jobs with an execution threshold specified for each, every time a job runs it checks in with the job logger and updates the last run time. If any of the jobs exceeds its run threshold they turn red on the job logger web page and appear in a daily email report of late or failed jobs. It's a great way of making sure everything is running as expected rather than having to check logs from various different programs, backup utilities and schedulers, or worse finding out your backups have been failing for months when you go looking for that lost critical file. Job logger also acts a failover controller for some of the aussieblogs bots where the same bot runs on a few different machines and checks in with the job logger to see if it should run due to primary bot for that job not checking in. I'm really happy with this implementation, its a nice simple solution to monitoring scheduled jobs that only alerts me if there is a problem, and otherwise keeps quiet.
Geekout Night
Posted on 24. Feb, 2005
Finally got around to playing with PodCasting. To be honest I didn't quite get the idea of PodCasting, it just sounded like a bunch of people pumping out MP3's and making a lame attempt capitalise on the iPod name through using "pod" in the name, which it sort of is. But now that I've actually installed iPodder and see how the RSS subscriptions work, its quite interesting. It certainly scores well for ease of use, although not quite one-click, so I'm sure I'll bore of it. You leave iPodder running and it keeps iTunes and therefore your iPod fed with the latest subscribed audio.
Installed the latest Skype beta with voice mail. The client itself is nice, however SkypeOut, the PC-to-PSTN service continues to disappoint. I tried to use it today on a call to a conference bridge in US and had absolutely appalling performance. Every time I've made a SkypeOut call the performance has been so terrible for the people at the other end I've had to give up and go with the good old fashioned phone. It certainly fails the calling Mum in Australia test. I can't understand what's holding Skype back, the audio quality of the PC-to-PC product is excellent, and other VoIP competitors are offering far better PC-to-PSTN calling solutions.
Also tried BT Communicator, which is better quality than SkypeOut, more than likely due to BT routing the international calls direct over their premium networks, rather than least cost international routing used by SkypeOut, but the service is still very patchy even on my 1Mbps BT ADSL connection and again I had to switch to a normal phone.
After days of Trillian v0.74 nagging me to upgrade I downloaded Trillian v3.0. It's very slick. I've switched back to using this client solely to aggregate my AIM, MSN, ICQ and Y! accounts. My favourite feature has to be the in-chat smart-tags linked to wikipedia. Useful today for example when a chat buddy got me with an acronym I didn't know (FTTP), I just moused over and was given the definition in a nice popup layer. Trillian is highly recommended.
Sputnik for Konfabulator
Posted on 01. Dec, 2004
Sputnik is a neat widget for Konfabulator that downloads the album cover of the current tracking playing in iTunes and displays it on a little CD jewel case. Nice! I registered my copy of Kanfabulator today, along with AppRocket from Candy Labs. I don't have to say much more about Konfabulator, it speaks for itself -- nice desktop widget eye candy. The motivation for using AppRocket is to eliminate frustration from continually losing things on the start menu. AppRocket lets you type the first few words of the program you want to run, it's kind of like having a command-line interface running in Windows. You can expand it to include anything you want on your drive through filters such as My Documents, Bookmarks etc, but it gets a bit sluggish when typing ahead through 20,000 files. Best to limit it to the stuff you use.
http://www.widgetgallery.com/...
System utils
Posted on 02. Nov, 2004
I liked True Launch Bar enough to register it. TLB has lots of nice plugins and a neat auto updater, worth a look. While you're at it, see if Candy Labs AppRocket suits your way of working, it provides hotkey type ahead access to every file and program on your system, quite good once you get the hang of it. SwitchProxy, Copy Plain Text and IE View for Firefox are handy too.
Clicker
Posted on 02. Nov, 2004
Someone really needs program a port of Clicker for Win32. I'd love the play around with the presence awareness scripts and link it to the Activity Tracker on my web site. I have Bluetooth on most of machines, I'd just need one more dongle to complete coverage. Using a mobile phone with Bluetooth as a presence awareness device is a neat idea.
http://homepage.mac.com/...
Picasa
Posted on 02. Nov, 2004
The now Google owned Picasa is a great tool for managing and view your digital photo library. I've got 10GB of photos now, Picasa's excellent UI gives quick an easy access to my entire library from a single page. Highly recommended.
http://www.picasa.com/...
PC-Cillin Internet Security
Posted on 29. Jul, 2004
The USB drivers on my ThinkPad inexplicably corrupted the other week so I had to do a fresh Windows XP install to get them going again. The reinstall was relatively painless, only losing a few insignificant config files. Although frustratingly I had to go through that silly Windows activation hotline thing, where-as when the ThinkPad arrived new with the IBM preload it didn't need to be activated. Anyway that's not the point of this story, what I did lose for about the third time now was my Norton Anti Virus subscription. I was using NAV 2003 which is no longer available for download on Symantec's site, and as the install processes stealthly downloads the files to an obscure temp directory, it's virtually impossible to reinstall and recover your paid subscription if you lose it. I've played this game before of submitting requests to Symantec Support to download software, have new licenses issued, and linking my new install to my existing subscription, after going through the whole painful process of them verifying I'm a paid user. Well this time, with only 3 weeks left on my NAV subscription I decided to ditch the bastards.. I tried McAffee, Panda Titanium Antivirus 2004 and Trend Micro's PC-Cillin Internet Security 2004, and decided to go with the later. At least PC-Cillin give you a reusable install file, a real product key, a web site registration, an easily reinstallable subscription and free support. All in all very happy with PC-Cillin and the increased feature set it offers.
http://www.digitalriver.com/...
