Posts

I haven’t had time to update my blog for a while. The last couple of days has been spent trying to hunt down an annoying bug in my IAX client I’m writing. Sometimes when dialing in, my program would not get a notification from the Asterisk server that a call was in progress. So I have tested all sorts of things to try to find the bug. So today I finally used tcpdump to see exactly what kind of packets I got from the server. And the problem was that I connected from the inside of my firewall, out trough and back again! So it was just an miss-configuration, the program has been working all along. Isn’t the Darwin award coming up soon?

I’ve been hard at work on my IAX client software the last couple of days. I also have re-written a lot of the code. I decided early on that I wanted to have classical VU-meters to display the in and output volume. But I don’t want them to take to much CPU time. So I made a lot of optimizations on that code. So after the rewrite I managed to lower the CPU utilisation by half. And it’s fun to do programming in Cocoa, but the framework is hard to learn by the volume of it. But slowly I’m getting more comfortable.

After reading stuff like this and this, I wonder Is it only me who sees the connection? There’s been a lot of discussions on the net about Apple getting a bit of the Intel “Intel Inside” payoff and if they consider putting the logo on the new macs? My uneducated guess is that Mr Jobs actually made Intel change their logo to something worthy putting on a Mac. Just my guess. But I’m known to be insane… ...

I have had a bit of a snag in my program Im writing, so to do something else for a while. So I tried to install Ruby On Rails, a much talked about web developer framework. And after reading all the hype, I just had to see what it was like. So off to Ruby By Rails homepage to read up on it. They have a presentation area that has a couple of Quicktime films demonstrating Rails programming. And rails looks good! But another thing caught my eye, the guy managed to write code fast and easily it seemed. And the guy doing the demonstration was doing it on a Mac OS X machine. The speed and the way of working with text really blew me away. But nowhere could I find the name of the text editor. So I had some googling to do. And I found it. It’s called TextMate. So I wanted to buy it so I could use it to program my new VoIP software client. But I don’t have much money to spend on software right now, being totally broke, but after seeing the price €39 I bought it immediately, you can’t complain at that price. The integration with XCode looks good. I haven’t had any problems so far. It’s nice to see that you can find great software from small firms and download and buy them directly. ...

The IAX client I’m writing is coming along nicely. It’s now in a state that makes the program usable. And today I made changes so I could compile a universal binary. And the program works on my PPC mac, but I use some libraries I needed to change the makefiles for, so I don’t know if they work on a Intel Mac. It would be cool if I could get the first release to support universal binaries, so hopefully I can find someone who has a developer machine, or a pc with a hacked Mac OS X for Intel on it.

With the latest beta firmware in the Grandstream GXP-2000 VoIP phone, the have added support for BLF. This means that you can use the quick dial LEDs for status of extensions. You can monitor all extensions on your phone. If a extension is busy, the led for that extension is lit. You can also dial directly to the extension by pressing the dial button. Very handy. ...

So my wonderful wife gave me a new Powerbook G4 15". And it’s a a nice machine. A lot of people will probably laugh at me when the new Intel Powerbooks will be available in early 2006, but she could only get hold of one now. And I’m not complaining. I’m currently so poor that dogs compulsory take a piss on my leg. The screen has the same resolution as the last 17" screen. So now I have to change the font size in Xcode and NetNewsWire to be able to read. And I keep finding new specs on the machine. I had to go into the audio settings and found that the machine now supports 24-bit 96khz audio. There’s also digital I/O. ...

Googles new free service both delight and scare the shit out of me. They have managed to get people to sign up their mail at GMail, letting Google index all their emails. And now with Google Analytics we are going to give them every detail on how we surf? So George Orwell was wrong, you don’t need an totalitarian society to have full control of peoples life’s. We are in-fact giving them that for free. We write our thoughts and events, and then hands the information over to a company for them to go trough and index and generate patterns. And as long as the company is “not evil” it’s apparently ok. Makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. ...

On the latest versions of Apples Powerbook, there is a function called hibernate. Normally when you close the lid on your Powerbook to let it go to sleep, forgetting to plug it in to a charger, all your unsaved data will be lost. With hibernation activated, you just plug in your Powerbook with the depleted battery and press start. Now the desktop comes up, just the way it was when you put your machine to sleep. But this only works on the new machines? Well, some people beg to differ. Go read it and see if you can hack your machine to get it to work. I did it on my Powerbook G4 867ghz and have had no trouble so far. ...

I now have a working IAX soft phone up and running. Answering and dialing works. The sound quality is good. And the amount of cpu usage is around three percent. But as soon as I add all the animating graphics, like sound input/output meters and stuff, that figure will go up substantially. But one of the goals is to try to avoid letting the program becoming a resource hog. I decided to really try to stay focused on the basic stuff to really iron out the bugs/memory leaks before continuing to the fun stuff like user interface. But thanks to Project Builder, it’s easy to make a usable interface immediately. ...