Adam Sherman

eWeek is running an article on groupware for Linux:

Companies looking to migrate from Exchange to a Linux-based messaging system or that want broader groupware functionality will find a good solution in Scalix’s Email and Calendaring Platform. From the user’s perspective, the Outlook experience is very good, although the Web client could use some improvement. Email and Calendaring Platform is priced at $60 per user, $600 for a server with 500 mailboxes and $3,500 for the Enterprise Edition. More information is available at www.scalix.com.

I know that many clients are using Microsoft products only for groupware, so this is important.

This has some serious merit. If the SIP registrar can notice when an endpoint’s IP address changes and proactively query the user to reset the emergency services destination, we could have a workable solution.

Je viens de télécharger les photos de notres sortie du 24 d’octobre. Vous pouvez les voir ici. Si vous voulez des copies hautes-résolutions, contactez-moi.

It’s actually a pretty old story, but awesome nonetheless. Take a short break and read the story of “The Gimli Glider”.

While waiting for the bus in Montreal this weekend, I found a Starbucks with free wireless Internet access, provided by VidéoTron.

It’s a block away, on Saint-Denis, parallel to Barrie.

A little quick advice: sometimes when you encounter a solid obstacle, it is best to simply flow around, instead of trying to move it.

Like Water Around a Rock

This photo, taken on the Missisquoi River, near my mother’s place.

Corporate and personal communications is undergoing an obvious revolution right before our eyes. I won’t comment on this aspect of VoIP since there are so many doing so, particularly in the large news publications. However, we’re missing something: presence.

Instant messaging has boomed and become an almost integral part of our society, with youth leading this integration. Have we not noticed that this form of communication is almost entirely controlled by a select few corporations? To name a few:

• AOL (AIM & ICQ)
• Microsoft (MSN)
• Yahoo

This is all a Bad Thing™! Lets reminisce for a moment about good, old fashioned, email service. This technology is completely decentralized and relies on each entity having their own SMTP system. If I want to send you mail, I simply do a DNS lookup to find your mail server and off I go. This server can either be provided by your ISP, out-sourced to another provider or you may have set it up internally.

Contrast this with IM, where your messages are being routed by a third-party who:

• Is not receiving money from you
• Made you accept a disclaimer that basically guarantees less than nothing
• Doesn’t really want to interface with the other IM providers

To actually start discussing VoIP now, the above prevents good presence for VoIP applications.

Thankfully, the defacto VoIP protocol, SIP, has full support for an SMTP-like distrbuted model using SRV records in DNS. This allows the DNS system to be queries for the correct SIP server for a domain and therefore gives us nice, convenient addresses for voice communications using the familiar “user@domain” form.

Built on top of SIP, there is SIMPLE or the S I M P L E. This upgrades your SIP infrastructure to support full presence and instant messaging capabilities. So far, I know of very few clients that have full SIMPLE support:

• X-Ten‘s eyeBeam (Commercial, Win32 & Mac OS X)
• Pulver‘s pulver.Communicator (Win32)

Also, I believe that Microsoft‘s Windows Messenger is available in a SIP edition.

A major open instant messaging protocol, Jabber, also has the above mentioned SRV capability. It seems to be under implemented in practice, however, with many people not even bothering. Jabber uses the XMPP protocol and bridges exist to allow SIMPLE to interoperate with it.

I’m rambling here. To get to the point, it seems that integrating SIP hardware devices : Analog Telephone Adapters (ATAs), like those from Sipura, and desk phones like those from Polycom; with presence provided either by SIMPLE or XMPP, is a problem. See, when you are using a great hardware phone for actual calling, you can’t do decent presence. How will my Jabber client know that I’m on the phone in order to set my status to “On the phone”?

My conclusion is that we should really be using softphones. Why not? Don’t we all have laptops and Bluetooth headsets? Well, I intend to get myself fully setup this way. To heck with all the other ways of getting voice service. Also, Jabber isn’t a great candidate unless you use something like the myJabber Instant Messaging Client for XMPP and myJabber AE Soft Phone combination, which is non-standard.

More to come on this topic once I get a copy of eyeBeam for Mac OS X to play with.

We had been noticing that incoming calls over the FXO port of our Sipura 3000 (SPA-3000) were a little too soft. Obviously, turning the volume up on our Polycom phones helped but I thought this should be adjustable using on of the SPA-3000s zillion options.

From the user guide, I determined that “PSTN to SPA Gain”, on the PSTN Line tab, allows the gain to be adjusted from -15dB to 12dB. I set it to 1, and am very happy with the volume.

Under Archectypes 1.3 (final), I had a ReferenceField setup with searchable=True and this caused a TypeError when saving the object:

Traceback (innermost last):
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 100, in publish
  Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 40, in call_object
  Module Products.CMFFormController.FSControllerPageTemplate, line 98, in __call__
  Module Products.CMFFormController.BaseControllerPageTemplate, line 39, in _call
  Module Products.CMFFormController.ControllerBase, line 191, in getNext
  Module Products.CMFFormController.Actions.TraverseTo, line 36, in __call__
  Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 40, in call_object
  Module Products.CMFFormController.FSControllerPythonScript, line 105, in __call__
  Module Products.CMFFormController.Script, line 141, in __call__
  Module Products.CMFCore.FSPythonScript, line 104, in __call__
  Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 306, in __call__
  Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 343, in _bindAndExec
  Module Products.CMFCore.FSPythonScript, line 160, in _exec
  Module None, line 11, in content_edit
   - <fscontrollerpythonscript at /plone1/content_edit used for /plone1/organization.2004-10-04.8620291094>
   - Line 11
  Module Products.Archetypes.BaseObject, line 573, in processForm
  Module Products.Archetypes.BaseObject, line 566, in _processForm
   - __traceback_info__: (<organization at /plone1/organization.2004-10-04.8620291094>, <field Notes(text:rw)>, <bound method Organization.setNotes of <organization at /plone1/organization.2004-10-04.8620291094>>)
  Module Products.Archetypes.CatalogMultiplex, line 60, in reindexObject
  Module Products.CMFMember.CatalogTool, line 51, in catalog_object
  Module Products.ZCatalog.ZCatalog, line 513, in catalog_object
  Module Products.ZCatalog.Catalog, line 381, in catalogObject
  Module Products.ZCTextIndex.ZCTextIndex, line 163, in index_object
  Module Products.ZCTextIndex.ZCTextIndex, line 173, in _index_object
  Module Products.Archetypes.BaseObject, line 475, in SearchableText
  Module Products.Archetypes.BaseObject, line 475, in <lambda>
  Module Products.Archetypes.utils, line 276, in getValue
TypeError: DisplayList keys must be strings or ints, got <extension class Acquisition.ImplicitAcquirerWrapper at 775140>

The only reference to this that I’ve found is on the list. Setting searchable=False avoids the issue. I do not know if this is an actual bug.