Technology Posts

I’m always amazed when I see what the larger voice over IP (VOIP) companies are charging these days. Last time I looked at Vonage, I believe they were charging around $30/month, plus an activation fee and equipment fee of around $70 at the start. So while you do get a lot of bells and whistles included in that price (caller ID etc), it’s still rather expensive in my mind. If you’re looking for something cheaper, and you have an Internet connection at home, here’s what you can do. First, you’ll need either a SIP softphone or an analog telephone adapter (ATA). A popular SIP softphone is CounterPath’s X-Lite which you can grab from CounterPath’s main website. Unfortunately, they only have a Windows version available, so Mac users need another option. At least for me, I’ve never really been a fan of using a headset to make calls on a computer. […]

As I’m pretty beat, I’ll post in more detail about WordCamp Whistler over the next few days. But I wanted to just say that it was a really great success in my opinion, and for the most part, went off without any hitches. I want to thank John Bollwitt and Rebecca Bollwitt for all their hard work over the last two months to help make it possible. I also want to thank all of the sponsors, speakers, and of course, the attendees who came up and made it a success. Photo by John Biehler We were hoping that at least 50 people would ultimately show up. The official turn out was somewhere around 105 people, which was really awesome. I was approached by various people over the course of the weekend and told how great it was to have a conference of this nature in Whistler. It’s going to take […]

WordCamp Whistler is just around the corner, and we’ve already seen an increase in ticket sales these last few days. If you’re interested in coming, you should go ahead and buy your tickets now. Right now tickets are $35, but as of Friday, January 9th, they’ll increase to $40. The following Friday, January 16th, they will increase to $50, and shortly afterwards they will no longer be available. If you’d like to purchase your tickets, please visit our EventBrite page and pick up your tickets now. Included in the price of your ticket is a full day of WordPress-related talks, complimentary lunch, a one-of-a-kind piece of winter-related WordPress swag, and access to the social event, complete with a few free drinks. There are still a few sponsorship spots open, so if you’re looking for some extra exposure for your company, and to be a part of the first WordCamp in […]

Boris tipped me off on Twitter to a few articles about VoIP to ring in the new year. Here are a few: 2008, The Year That VOIP Died VoIP is not dead

How do you feel about that? I read this article with the CEO of Ford today, where the interviewer basically pummeled him. When asked about Ford’s strategy with regards to electric cars, the CEO had this to say: We are working on that [fully electric cars], but let me just share with you the Ford plan about that. Our No. 1 priority is to improve the internal combustion engine, and that’s why the turbocharging, the direct fuel injection, we get a 20 percent improvement in fuel mileage and a 15 percent reduction in CO2, but we get that across all of the engines, across all the vehicles. Then we move to more electrification with the hybrids as you mentioned, and we are very excited that the next step after that will be full electrification. Now we’re tied into the grids, and we really have moved to an energy independence solution. […]

I sat down right now to write a blog entry, and this is the one I came up with. There have been numerous entries on various websites over the last few weeks that have hinted that blogging is dead. While I don’t necessarily believe them, I can’t help but see some truth in a few of their statements. First, let it not be forgotten that the *ability* to blog is at an all time maximum. Thanks to the work of Automattic and WordPress, it’s relatively painless to start a blog, either on WordPress.com or on your own hosted server. That being said, I have to question just how many people are listening these days, and of those, how many really care to participate in genuine discussions. With regards to my own blog, traffic has stayed fairly constant over the last year or so. The proportion of traffic has changed, moving […]

I started messing around with some CSS3 stuff the other day and managed to add a web font to my site. As you can see, the title of every post is now rendered using a non web-safe font (at least if your browser supports CSS3 – right now I believe only Safari does). It’s a bit premature, as many browsers do not support them, but I thought I’d start figuring out the tricks of tomorrow’s trades. It’s just a bit of CSS magic, along with a true-type font on the server. The browser downloads the TTF and renders the titles using that font. I think it’s a pretty cool new feature, and I am looking forward to when web-fonts are part of a ubiquitous surfing experience. ** On another note, I have to drop my car off at the body shop tomorrow to get the damage to my door repaired. […]

One of my major criticisms of Google over the last few years has been the state of most of their products. While many of them are initially innovative and useful, they usually fall by the way side and seemingly get abandoned. The “beta” moniker seems to be ever-present on most of their services, leading one to almost believe that there is no such thing as a finish product within the walls of Google. I just read this article where someone took the time to figure out just how many of Google’s products are in beta. The verdict? Nearly half of them, including the four year old gmail product and google docs. Everyone knows Google is fond of the beta label on its products, but we wanted some actual numbers so went through all of Google’s products to see how many of them are in beta,” Pingdom analyst Peter Alguacil tells […]

This isn’t really a huge surprise to me, but apparently BlueRay sales aren’t doing very well at all. In fact, sales of BlueRay went down last month compared to the month before. There are probably a lot of reasons why other people aren’t buying them, namely the high price of current BlueRay players. But in terms of me, I’m not buying one simply because I’m still pissed off from the whole HD-DVD/BlueRay battle. On my shelf at home is a now useless HD-DVD player, which I purchased thinking HD-DVD would be around a little while longer. Since the industry basically screwed consumers with that whole debacle, I’m fighting back a bit with my wallet. Sony hoped to have a 50% market share this year, and right now they are sitting around 8% I think. Given that internet speeds are climbing fast, and that Apple TV now rents pseudo HD films, […]

To be honest, I haven’t really spent much money on my home theatre setup in about seven years or so. But for a while there, I was into fairly decent home audio equipment. That’s not to say I don’t do the odd update from time to time, because I do: last year I purchased a HD-DVD player, and more recently an Apple TV, the former of which was a rather poor investment (although it performs quite well as a basic upsampling DVD player). My current home setup consists of the following. In terms of speakers, I’ve never been big on home theatre, and have always tried to have my system focus more on stereo audio instead. Shortly after starting my first job out in Ottawa, I received a pretty hefty bonus in exchange for giving up about six months of my life crawling around clean rooms and setting up fiber […]