jim.bernatowicz

This is a video review put together by the good folks at Geekanoids for the Ipevo SOLO S0-10 Skype phone. It is a standalone unit; it requires no computer, just a wired ethernet connection. Skype is embedded.

The reviewer gives this phone a top rating in call quality, and ease of use. It has a handset and a speakerphone.

Based on this favorable review, as well as others seen around the net, I placed an order for one today. If you act quickly, Ipevo.com is offering the phone for $109 with free FedEx Ground shipping within the United States.

Arrrgh! Arrrgh!! Is it September 19th already?

Sadly, no. I just wasted a good number of hours with my Skype setup on Ubuntu 8.10, then 9.04, then 9.10! Hours of my life that I'll never get back!

Last night I decided to try out the new features and call quality improvements promised in the latest 2.1 beta 2. I uninstalled Skype 2.0.0.72 and installed Skype 2.1.0.81 beta 2. First thing I noticed was that the call audio was played through my laptop speakers, not my USB uConnect U-901.

Tonight I was searching for some tools to create screencast videos. I found recordMyDesktop, which records audio and video, but outputs the video in an ogg file format.

In looking for a way to convert ogg files to Flash video flv format, I stumbled across this very interesting how-to on video editing with the ffmpeg program.

My friend Dave Fox has started a new website for Survival and Homesteading at survivalfox.com

Its very important to firewall your server if its directly connected to an untrusted network.

I put together this sample for my box by using this helpful iptables tutorial.

This configuration allows any outbound traffic, and inbound requests only on ports 25, 80, 110, 443, and 37530. Everything else gets sent to the LOGNDROP rules which log the attempts on syslog, but no more than 5 per minute, and then discards the packets.

Subversion is now officially an Apache project, which is great news for the long-term support of this version control system.

As seen today on http://subversion.apache.org:

The Subversion project is pleased to announce that we have graduated from the Incubator at the Apache Software Foundation and are now officially Apache Subversion. Although this is largely a procedural step, it's an important one for our goal of making the ASF the permanent home of the Subversion community.

In no particular order, here is a list of PHP frameworks that I am considering:

ez Components purports to be an "Enterprise" PHP library. This is very appealing to me, in that I am not interested in making a blog in 20 minutes. My typical applications need to integrate with back-end corporate systems, have non-trivial security and filtering rules, and the like. The framework at first glance is much larger than some competitors listed here, so likely carries with it a larger learning curve. As much as I enjoy the intellectual excercise of framework development, I'd much rather have the productivity and consistency across my programming team that a framework brings. More on this after I build my first experiment with ezComponents.

Here is a list of resources that I am gathering regarding eZ Components:

http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Introduction-To-eZ-Components-part-1.html
http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Introduction-To-eZ-Components-part-2.html
http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Introduction-To-eZ-Components-part-3.html

I just found a solution to a thorn that's been in my side for some time now. On a few occasions I have had the need to use a photo gallery or page flip book SWF that reads an XML file to tell it which images to load, and provide basic text information such as captions.