Nerdblog.com

12/22/2004

Vonage is canceled

Well I've gone around in circles with Vonage, love it, then wow it sounds bad. I mean, I can program how many rings to try before forwarding to my cellphone? That's cool. But I can't hear what other people are saying on a conference call? That's really not cool.

I measured latency at about 250ms above a normal phone line (that's about a quarter-second), and after enough choppy conference calls, it only made sense to be done with Vonage.

I have a 1.1mbit SDSL, which is way above their minimum configuration (128kbit). I'm only a couple hops from Level3's backbone in LA. My ping to Google is 20ms. This all should be adequate, so I didn't spend time trying to figure out why it's broken. This stuff's really gotta be plug-and-play.

I really wanted this to work -- the features are amazing and so is the price, but I guess in the end you get what you pay for.

12/14/2004


Well, no shooting stars from last night, but lots of other stars. Posted by Hello


Thank god it can sleep. Looks like microsoft reads all the contents of your files, even if that makes no sense. I watched it sit on a particularly large WAV file for about 10 minutes. Posted by Hello

12/13/2004


Welcome to the slowest program ever written for the PC. I mean, c'mon, they wrote the filesystem, how can it be so bad? Posted by Hello

12/04/2004

Vonage

I've been getting increasingly irritated by my phone company. Every six months, they send me a nice note: "Sorry, but your phone package isn't offered anymore. We're upgrading you to another one and charging you an extra $10/month." "Due to new state regulations, we've added five new taxes, amounting to $8.53/month to your bill. So my local bill, with no long-distance service, was edging towards $50.

And SBC's online billpay isn't really reasonable. You have to send them a checking account number, and then approve each bill by logging into your account, based on an email they send you each month (which usually gets spam filtered).

Simultaneously my long distance seems to be accruing the same sorts of taxes and charges, and it's been about $30 or more monthly.

Now I'm paying all this money, when my home phone's forwarded to my cellphone. See, that's one of the things I'm paying for, the forwarding, and the long distance to forward it.

So after shaking my head at the latest phone bill, I finally sprung for Vonage, signed up and asked them to send me their VoIP package.

I still do like having a home phone, to make long calls without using up minutes. I know other people just use their cellphone, but I get into hours-long conference calls (800-numbers) when I'm working at home, and that just doesn't make sense.

And since I'm probably the only one who reads 48-page agreements in 48-character wide windows, here's the fine print: When you signup, they make you clickthrough an agreement where you agree not to do telemarketing or other automated services, and they make you agree that 911 service might not work properly. In particular, you might not get a local operator, and it won't work when the power's out. Ok, I understand.

But anyway, the service is $25/month for unlimited long distance, and if you have your internet through a non-ADSL provider (mine's SDSL, but cable works too), you will save probably $50 a month on local phone service all told. That makes a big difference over a year, and so that's what I'm doing.

12/03/2004

Perforce searching

I just wrote a script to dump all my perforce changelists from the server to my local drive.

And I'm running Google Desktop, so it indexes them all instantly. The trick is to put them all in a folder with a special name (like "changelists") and then search your desktop for "changelists picasa" or whatever you want to find. Makes a total history of who did what and when and why.

I've always wanted source code history & searchability (like a wiki at least), and this gets me lots of the way there.