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I’ve been looking for a softphone for Macintosh that uses IAX, but I haven’t been able to find a good one. The EyeBeam and X-lite uses sip and has stability problems so they are not an option either. So I started to write my own softphone. It’s nice to be programming in Cocoa again. But I’m becoming old, so I have to read up on programming in Cocoa again. I have a working softphone up and running already. Well, sort of. It receives calls and you can answer and talk. But I’ve only been writing on it for two days, and most of the time has been spent on installing a Subversion system on my server. As soon as I get a polished version, I’ll put up a beta program. I’m thinking of calling the program “Breaker-Breaker!” in the old CB-radio spirit. And yes, it will have the old style analog VU indicators for bandwidth and voice volume. ...

I’m currently looking for a new job, so I needed to write a CV and some other stuff. So I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to try out Apple Pages. Sure, it’s a bit buggy and slow in some instances, but over all it’s actually a pretty decent program. It won’t replace Microsoft Word for power users, but for people like me, who need to write simple documents, it’s perfect. My guess is that Apple have not done to well selling this program. And if they go the normal route, they’ll just stop updating it and let it die. This is a lesson that Apple really need to learn from Microsoft. They have to stick to it, improving the program, and the buyers will come.

As soon as you mention the word VoIP, everyone responds with “Skype?” This immediately gets me into an discussion why people should not use Skype. The fact that your computer is used as a link to route traffic, much like BitTorrent. That it is based on a proprietary protocol, only known by Skype, so no other manufacturers can make compatible equipment without permisson (and probably a big fat wad of cash) to Skype Corporation. All this means that there’s no connection between Skype and regular SIP phones that is emerging as the standard for VoIP calls. But all hope is not lost. ...

I helped my friend Micke to set up an Asterisk@Home PBX server today. But when setting up Free World Dialup FWD, we had some problems. First I forgot to enable IAX in the account setup. After that, dialing out worked, but we could not dial in to his FWD number. To connect we use an IAX trunk. We searched for an hour trying to find the problem, and after searching Google we finally found the answer. In the trunk settings for FWD, the incoming user context has to be named iaxfwd. Irritating to say the least. After changing the name everything worked fine.

Asterisk: The Future of Telephony online from O’Reilly Media. They have released it under the Creative Commons license. This means that you can download the book here for free. But it also means that you should buy the book here. Now you have the downloaded pdf version for quick searching, and the nice feel of a paper copy for browsing.

After setting up my Asterisk@Home server and do all the configuring to get all lines and extensions up and running, it was time for recording the Digital Receptionist messages. My first stab at it wasn’t that great, let’s face it, I’m no voice-over announcer. I wanted a little more professionally sounding recording. So I started to search the net for a way to do it, and I think I found a pretty good solution. ...

I got my first real Voip phone, the Grandstream GXP-2000 a week ago. I have two ATA boxes to connect my old wireless phones, but I wanted to try out a real IP-phone. It’s a nice enough phone, feels a bit cheap (which it is), but I guess you can’t get everything for $100. Connecting it to my Asterisk server was a no-brainer. It has a web interface for setup, but you can do basic setup like ip-numbers from the phonepad. It’s great to have an message-waiting led on the phone. Then you just press the MSG button to listen to your voice-box messages. To enable this function, just put *97 in the field “Voice Mail UserID” in the Account page of the web setup. There’s support for up to 11 line indicators (with an additional key-module) but I think I’ll do fine with four. The only thing I haven’t got working is the Conference button, but it’s easy to just transfer the calls to a conference number. You also have 7 quick dial buttons. To configure them, just go to the web setup for the phone and enter the name and number. The sound quality is excellent. Much better than both the Linksys PAP2 and the i3 micro Vood VRG-121 box I have for my old analog phones. The speaker phone works, but isn’t fantastic. I normally just use the speaker phone while waiting for the call to go through, so for me that’s not a problem. There’s a new firmware I’ve just installed that’s supposed to make the speaker phone part work better, but I haven’t had time to test it fully. So would I recommend this phone? Yes, if you need a cheap voip phone that uses SIP I can really recommend this one. ...

While watching some old stuff I recorded on my Dreambox, I found an old episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; the guest was Donald Trump. Leno is auctioning out a motorcycle for charity. A guest (a blond bimbo who’s name eludes me) sold a kiss to the audience for $500 for charity, which Jay Leno quickly doubled. During which one of wealthiest persons in the US sat silent, doing nothing. His publicist must have torn his hair out. You can’t make yourself look cheaper than that. Being a sleazy bastard is probably one of the many things you need to get that rich, but I rather stay poor than let me become anything like that man.

Update: The code below does not work in Asterisk 2.0b4 or newer. I will update with instructions on how to get it to work in those versions. Thanks to Dan for pointing this out. Update: I have changed the code to the removed part. It now requires a key press to accept the number to delete. I have added a blacklist function to my Asterisk@Home server and thought that I’d share it here if someone is interested. There are two ways to add a number to the blacklist. The easiest is to dial *32. Then you get a voice telling you the number of the last incoming call. To add it to the blacklist, press 1. Great use against pesky telemarketers and If you want to add it manually, press *30. Then you can enter the phone number directly on your telephone. To remove an entry from the blacklist, press *31 and enter the phone number. If you don’t like the codes I use, change them. ...

There’s a system called ENUM that enables VoIP servers like Asterisk to check the number your dialing to see if there is a possibility to connect directly to your server instead of going over PSTN land lines. So I registered at E164.org and added my phone number. I tried to figure out how to add this functionality to Asterisk@Home, but couldn’t find anything on how to do it. But I finally managed to get it to work, and it’s really simple. Here’s how I did it. ...