Free Linux Soft Phone Released :: Voxilla.com :: A user’s guide to the VoIP revolution

When I first read at work about the free Zultys IP Soft phone for Linux (in Internet Telephony?), I decided I needed to check it out. Then when I saw another mention of it in Voxilla’s RSS feed while I was sitting at my Linux box tonight, I decided it was time to give it a try. If I can get a SIP-based soft phone running on Linux, I will be a lot less interested in trying to figure out how to get Skype running on Linux.

After filling out a very brief identification form, I downloaded the rpm file for their softphone. They currently claim to support RedHat 7.1, RedHat 8.0, and RedHat 9.0.

Files were installed to /usr/local/zultys, with a symbolic link in /usr/local/bin/softphone pointing to /usr/local/zultys/softphone. When I tried to start it from the command line with “softphone”, though, all I got was a segmentation fault. Runing it as root gave the same results.

$ starting...
/usr/local/bin/softphone: line 44: 17685 Segmentation fault
    ./KylixPhone 2>/dev/null

Interesting to see that they used Borland’s Kylix development tool to build it.

Although I’m pleased that they have a LIPZ4 discussion board there aren’t many posts there, and no one else was reporting the same problem. I’ll bang my head against it for a while longer before seeking help there, to make sure I haven’t missed something obvious.

Ever since I got the Treo 600, I’ve been neglecting my Sony Clie T615C, a very nice PDA that runs Palm OS 4.1. A few months ago, I spent way too many hours trying to figure out how to sync the Clie to Evolution on Red Hat 9 Linux. I updated to new versions of Evolution and the gnome-pilot software and I followed instructions on other people’s website, but no joy was to be had. So, the Clie has been sitting dormant in its cradle for many weeks.

Yesterday I was reading through the January 2004 Red Hat newsletter and saw a section on tips for Open Office. That led me to a tip by Richard Keech on getting a colored shell prompt, which led to his homepage, which finally led to his instructions for getting his Palm device working with Red Hat Linux over USB.

Finally, the promised land. His instructions saved the day. Specifically:

#cd /dev

ln -s ttyUSB1 pilot

chmod 600 ttyUSB1

chown <username>.uucp ttyUSB1

After doing the above, I was able to use Pilot Settings… in the Tools menu of Evolution to set up my Clie to sync with Evolution 1.45. Stuff like this has got to get easier before Linux can really start making inroads against Windows as a desktop OS.

For my needs and tastes, the Treo 600 is a far better PDA phone than any other Palm, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc. device I’ve checked out. But of course, there are still a couple things that bother me or I wish had been better implemented. Although this might look like a long list, that’s mainly because the Treo has so many features. A lot of these issues don’t even apply to most other phones, because the other phones are so lacking to begin with. I would generally rather have a 95% perfect, and useful, feature, than not have the feature at all. If Palm One/Handspring added all these features, the phone would likely cost even more, weigh more, and have worse battery life. But I reserve the right to ask for them, anyway.

• The camera is terrible. Lots of digital noise in images. Very low contrast. Update 2/11/04: It’s not as bad as I thought.
• Lo-res screen (only 160×160, but at least it is very readable, even in bright daylight, and it doesn’t apear to be a huge drain on battery life)
• Some MIDI ringtones are too quiet, even on max volume. If you’re willing to spend the time, you can usually boost the volume by editing the midi file.
• Weak vibrate mode
• Using headphones for MP3 playback requires an extra, and not included, adapter
• No built-in support for voice dialing
• No voice recording – Update: SoundRec and MovieRec fill the gap nicely, though.
• Location of the SD card slot causes the card to often pop out when I take the phone out of my pocket
• I can’t figure out how to easily drop a call when another call comes in, so I end up leaving my voicemail on hold (which eats up minutes) while taking a call that comes in while I’m checking voicemail
• No external LED to indicate waiting voicemail and/or SMS Update: Check out $6 add-on Treo Butler.
• No removable battery Update: though higher capacity replacement batteries are available
• Java runtime environment not pre-installed and integrated Update: but you can download the WebSphere J2ME runtime for $6
• No always-on LCD with a clock, like many flip phones have
• Selecting text requires use of the stylus Update: Check out $10 add-on TreoSelecText

With my previous cellphone, I had the option of buying a $100 data kit from Sprint that would let me use the phone essentially as a modem. I didn’t spend a lot of time investigating this option, since it sounded like a lot of hassle for what would have been a really slow connection that chewed up a lot of airtime minutes.

A friend (thanks, Paul!) recently tipped me off to PdaNet from the June Fabrics PDA Technology Group. PdaNet lets your Treo function as a wireless data connection for your laptop. Unfortunately, your laptop has to be running Windows. After downloading the .prc file and syncing it onto my Treo, I was browsing the web almost immediately from my laptop (with WiFi radio turned off and no Ethernet cable attached, of course).

If you have a Treo 600 and a laptop running Windows, it’s a very well-spent $34. They offer a 15-day free trial so you can make sure it works for you before you buy it.

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p>Treo 600 users need version 2.5.2, which came out less than a week ago. So far, it has worked flawlessly for me. At one point I got an error dialog on the Treo saying something like “Error: Serial: port in use (0×0307)”, but the dialog disappeared within a few seconds and I continued browsing as if nothing had happened. The FAQ explains that this is due to a conflict with the Sprint PCS Business Connection software when it tries to auto-connect and synchronize email and documents.

<

p>

When PdaNet connected, it claimed that it had negotiated a 145 kbps connection. I tried the bandwidth meter at 2wire.com and got speeds of 107.8, 130.2, 99.9, 90.3, 90.5, and 79.9 kbps. During the tests, the signal strength on the phone stayed pretty constant at two bars.

I was even able to connect to my corporate LAN through our Avaya VPNRemote software as easily as if I were using a wired or wireless connection on my home LAN. Outlook was even slower than usual, but it was still better than over a dial-up connection. The 2wire bandwidth meter indicated speeds of 59.8 and 83.7 kbps over the VPN. Not bad, considering the overhead of the VPN encryption and the additional path through my company’s routers before getting to 2wire’s website.

Overheard yesterday in the checkout line at Safeway:

Mother to young son and daughter: ” Now, you kids go get some of that Neopoleon ice cream.”

Heck, what do I know know? Maybe Ben & Jerry’s have come out with a Neopolitan ice cream that’s made with French General Vanilla. Or maybe it’s a co-branding marketing ploy to help boost ticket sales for The Matrix: Revolutions and bring back respect for the idol of Bonaparte buffs.

Matz’s presentation at OSCon 2003 on The Power and Philosophy of Ruby lists three basic principles of programming language design.

• Choose good names
• Understanding humanity
• Embedding hidden messages

Some of his points that really hit home relate to succinctness, fewer bad surprises, reduction of stress, consistency, and offering more than one way to accomplish a task, but clearly indicating a preferred way.

His presentation links to Paul Graham’s excellent Succinctness is Power essay. Although it is critical of Python for lack of succinctness, I think Python provides a good trade-off between succinctness and readability. Perl may be very succinct, by I find it nearly impossible to read, whether line by line or as a whole program, even if it is shorter. Perhaps I would change my mind if I were willing to submit to a couple week brainwashing/training session, but I don’t think it’s worth it. Maybe I should check out Ruby. Or even better, Groovy.

[via Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon]

There are tons more photos and some reviews of the SRL show in Berkeley at the SRL website. The people taking these photos were much closer to the action than me, so you should definitely check them out. They also took a bunch of very cool pre-show photos. Also, because of where I was standing, I completely missed out on the flame tornado.

On November 12, 2003, I attended a live performance by Survival Research Labs at the Berkeley Art Museum. In addition to taking a couple photos, I used my Canon S400 to shoot some video. I’ve finally gotten around to scaling the video down enough in iMovie to post here. Get ready to see and hear the firing of a V1 rocket engine, a Tesla coil sending 20+ foot sparks into metallic sheets hanging from trees, and a set of 150 dB pulse jets.

The original videos were 320×240 resolution, 15 fps AVI files. The S400 lets you shoot three minutes of video before it needs to dump the audio and video from internal memory to a Compact Flash card. Three minutes of video at that resolution ends up being close to 45 MB. I used iMovie to get the two clips down to 7 and 3 MB.

The last two segments ended up being the best. This first segment highlights the firing of the V1 rocket engine. Near the end, there is some good footage of the huge Tesla coil sending 25-30 foot sparks into what appears to be sheets of mylar hanging from large trees.

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p>The Hovercraft also makes an appearance. You can see it in the background as a couple people drag it out of the path of the V1. It has 4 pulse jets. Each one is four feet long and glows red hot while in operation. The two pairs of jets can be rotated around on the top of the Hovercraft, giving it sort of a radar antenna feel. The jets glow red hot when in operation and they make a very cool wailing sound that you hear throughout most of the video. The SRL website describes the Hovercraft as:

The loudest robot in the world at 150 decibels. Louder than a cruise missile until it blows up.

The Hovercraft didn’t blow up during the show, although two of the pulse jets did burst into flames. Maybe that counts as blowing up. At an SRL show, it’s hard to know whether something has caught on fire on purpose or by accident.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This QuickTime movie is about 7 MB and the video lasts three minutes.

The second segment starts with some absolute Tesla coil mayhem, before the V1 kicks back in with full effect. As you watch these videos, keep reminding yourself that this is happening in the courtyard of a University art museum in the middle of Berkeley.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This QuickTime movie is about 3 MB and the video lasts just under two minutes.

If you need to install Movable Type on a DreamHost shared server, you might find my installation notes to be of use. They might even be helpful if you don’t use DreamHost, but no promises. The web page for my notes currently comes up fifth when you google on “install movable type”. It’s a mystery to me.

VoIP in ’04 :: Voxilla.com :: A user’s guide to the VoIP revolution

The staff over at Voxilla have put together a compelling set of predictions for big VoIP-related happenings in 2004. Here are a couple I found most interesting.

2. Many new VoIP enabled routers hit the market.

I think this will be a huge boon to Skype’s competitors. If more routers came with out-of-the-box configurations for VoIP, that would take away Skype’s only serious advantage.

9. Broadband service providers up their uplink speeds.

I can only hope. I would gladly pay more to get a boost to my average 500 kbps download speed, but my broadband provider, Earthlink (via Covad), has a big gap in price between the plan I have and the cheapest SOHO plan. Even worse, when I check the Earthlink site to see if I can upgrade to that plan, it tells me that they offer only dial-up access to my address. Never mind the fact that they have provided me with DSL service for years. As much as I dislike SBC, their prices look pretty good and their wide variety of offers blow Earthlink away.

10. FCC steps in on regulation.

Maybe I will be proven to be a fool, but I’m not quite as worried about this as most people. Regulation isn’t all bad. If one of my neighbors develops a new kind of death ray device that doesn’t use the old fashioned death rays that the Regional Death Ray Operating Companies have been relying on for years, I’m going to want to see some regulation imposed. Just don’t go crazy on me and ban all kinds of Death Ray research and development or make it where only the big guys can compete.

Update 1/13/04: These quotes from FCC Chairman Michael Powell match up well with my feelings on the level of VoIP regulation that is needed. My concern over regulation is lesser than others primarily because I think heavy regulation is very unlikely. I agree that heavy regulation would be an extremely bad thing.

In the comments section, someone added:

11. VoIP Spam

This is so sad, but so true. As other commenters also point out, super cheap international calling rates will open us up to unregulated telemarketing calls from locations where English-speaking labor is cheap. Like North Dakota. Wait, they’re still regulated. Okay, then, India, Jamaica, and the Philippines. The Do-Not-Call list. Hmmm, maybe that regulation thing isn’t so bad in every case. The most important feature you’re going to need on your VoIP phone is an effective form of Caller ID.