don’t_panic

I’ve been using an iPhone for quite sometime now- I bought one just before the 3G’s came out- I was going to wait, but I figured I’d be able to pickup a first gen pretty cheap with the 3G’s coming out, and I wanted to get an unlocked one anyway, as I didn’t want to end up getting stuck with the Rogers plans/term contract.

I just installed a new app the other day, that gives you a native SIP/IAX2 client for your iPhone- which is pretty awesome, and something I’ve been waiting (and considering writing) for a while now. It’s called SiAX, and currently only available through Cydia (jailbroken phones).

The app works fairly well- the audio quality is good, and seems to be pretty solid. Unfortunately, you only seem to be able to receive calls through the app while you have the application running; it doesn’t maintain any SIP registration information when you close the app, which is a little weird. But for a quick call here and there, especially to avoid roaming charges on the road, it’s pretty decent.

I’ve actually disabled my data plan with Rogers, as it’s a rare occasion that I’m not around a wifi connection- even when I’m travelling, there’s usually at least one Starbucks around. Of course, this was only after incurring hundreds of dollars in roaming data usage.

Telephony

There was a great post about fonolo just put up on Chris Pirillo’s blog

Fonolo

I’m really impressed that so many big companies, like facebook and google, have taken the time to release patches and source code, back out to the open-source community. Being able to improve memcached throughput from 50,000 requests/s to 200,000 requests/s is an amazing achievement.

The changes that the facebook guys have made to memcache are going to help a lot of people out there, including fonolo. We’re using memcache heavily in-house, not only for web-based caching, but for a lot of the back-end VoIP and speech recognition applications.

We, obviously, don’t require the throughput that facebook does- given they just recently released data that showed they were adding more than 600,000 new users per day, more than 70% of which are coming from outside the USA. That’s growth at a staggering rate!

I have to say, that I’m a fan of facebook, and what they’ve managed to achieve, in a relatively short amount of time- I just have to wonder how long it will all last? Increasing your user-base by 600,000 users per-day; where is the plateau? Will it all eventually just topple over on itself?

Imagine when the next big social networking app comes out; will there be a mass-exodus from one to the other? or will facebook be so far in-grained in it’s users, that they won’t have any other choice but to stay?

No matter what happens,  it’s nice to know facebook is working out all the bugs for us.

Development, Fonolo, Social Networks

I justed released the latest and greatest version of Net::fonolo, a PERL module for accessing the fonolo.com developer program.

This release was pretty basic; just added support for the new API method company_list(), which returns a list of all the companies in the fonolo database, either by page, or by a date (so you can do incremental updates of a local cache).

If you’re interested in signing up for the fonolo developer program, click here.

The Net::fonolo module is available on CPAN , or here:

Net::fonolo v1.3 (5.49 KB bytes)
Added: Dec 17th, 2008

Net::fonolo is a PERL module for accessing the fonolo developer community.

Development, Fonolo

Even Microsoft doesn’t want you to use Internet Explorer; 

There was a pretty severe bug found, that apparently affects all versions on IE (even the yet-to-be-released IE8 was affected)- what’s even more surprising to me, is that so many people are still using IE6. I guess it’s simply because it came with XP, and because of the enormous flop of Vista, there’s probably even more people using XP than pre-vista-gate.

I’ve been using Chrome as my primary browser ever since (almost) it came out; it has quite a few bugs in it,  and the bookmarks support is terrible, but it’s fast and light- and doesn’t seem to eat memory like Firefox likes to (for no apparent reason.)

… if only the google guys would get on a plug-ins system of some kind- I hate having to switch back to firefox all the time for firebug.

But seriously- IE6? with all the CSS and Javascript “issues”? and not being able to render transparent gradients properly?

Maybe this exploit and all the press it’s getting is really a blessing is disguise for all us developers out there; maybe this will force a large percentage of the IE6 users over to the “other” pile.

Development