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Stupid airline UI tricks… what would happen if I did NOT accept the rebooking through Dulles?
Continue Reading: Stupid airline UI tricks… what would happen if I did NOT accept the rebooking through Dulles?I was rather dumbfounded a few minutes ago when I went down to the kiosk in the hotel lobby to print my border passes. After logging in to United’s webs site, I was immediately confronted by a big warning message:
Due to cancellations you have been rebooked onto the following flights:
<new flight info>
[No thank you] [Accept this flight]
“No thank you?” Huh? You have just been told that due to cancellations you are being rebooked – so why would you NOT choose “Accept this flight?” What happens if you press “No thank you”? Could you try another route? In this case would I have actually been booked on the same flight? Huh? (Needless to say, I didn’t try it.)
I guess the good news is that I’ll be avoiding Chicago tomorrow and flying down to DC (to Dulles) and then from there to Burlington. The other good news is that I’m not going to have to be at the airport at 4:45 in the morning… the bad news is that the flight gets in 2 hours later… but hey, I just want to get home!
Technorati tags: travel, united -
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ETEL – Black Bag Security Presentation, 243 slides, Lessig connection, errata… slides available
Continue Reading: ETEL – Black Bag Security Presentation, 243 slides, Lessig connection, errata… slides availableSo “the talk” finished around 11:15am this morning… I’ve just been straight out and unable to blog until now. The “Black Bag Security Review” was fun to do and I’ve been receiving a great amount of positive feedback and kind words from folks here. As you’ll see below, I’m going to include the slides here in Flash (I finally get a reason to experiment with SlideShare!). I’ll put a PDF up here as well once I get back to Vermont. It seems that after my laptop was reformatted, I never re-installed Acrobat to do PDF exports.
However, the slides aren’t really that much use without the audio, but I’ll be putting the audio up on Blue Box sometime in the next week or so and will post an update here with a link.
Had a couple of interesting questions and points of feedback about the talk (and things I noticed):
- Yes, there were actually 243 slides and yet it came in a hair under 15 minutes. This is a very different way of presenting than a “traditional” deadly PowerPoint presentation. More slides… minimal text… fast transitions. The point is to accent your story and leave the focus on you and what you are…
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Not looking so good for the flights back East from ETel…
Continue Reading: Not looking so good for the flights back East from ETel…Travelling in the US at this time of year is always a gamble. This is the time of large storms with snow, ice, sleet and all sorts of things that don’t particularly work well with large metal tubes flinging themselves through the air. The trip out would have been a complete mess had I flown 24 hours earlier… and now the trip back is looking like it has the potential to be… um… “interesting”. I’m leaving very early tomorrow morning flying United… and frequent travellers will immediately realize that flying United pretty much guarantees I’m flipping through Chicago.
Students of North American geography will take one look at the CNN weather forecast map to the right (click for a larger version) and realize the impending problem. For those not familar with the layout of our fair land, well… you see where that “L” is? Designating the center of the storm? Chicago is just a tiny bit to the right of that… pretty much where the cloud and other symbol is – meaning that it probably won’t be a terribly good travel day today in Chicago. United has already announced “severe weather problems” affecting Minnesota, which is just a…
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ETel – Too many great conversations to blog…
Continue Reading: ETel – Too many great conversations to blog…Too many conversations… that’s the struggle here. Just really great folks. Very much enjoying the sessions so far. Currently listening to the 5-minute lightening talks… tonight there is a “VoIP Blogger Dinner” organized by Andy Abramson… somehow I don’t think I’ll really be blogging about much of this until the plane trip home. (I am finding that I am doing some “micro-blogging” about web sites over on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/danyork/ )
Conference has been well organized. Only issue I’ve really had is that the WiFi network has been of varying quality. Sometimes it is working fantastically… sometimes it works for 20 minutes and then it dies… sometimes I just can’t connect, even though I’m sitting in the exact same spot I was an hour earlier. I realize it’s really tough to do WiFi for a conference… the demands on the network are a bit unnatural… especially with a heavily laptop-enabled crowd like this one.
Technorati tags: etel2007, etel, voip -
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ETel: FreeSWITCH Boot Camp…
Continue Reading: ETel: FreeSWITCH Boot Camp…I admit to really only very peripherally followed the growth of FreeSWITCH, so I was intrigued to attend the “FreeSWITCH Boot Camp” session this morning here at ETel. It was a tough call given that Stowe Boyd was also speaking, but I wanted to understand what FreeSwitch was all about. It was an interesting talk, although I’m left with the following observations:
- I’m still struggling to fully understand what problem the FreeSwitch community is trying to specifically solve versus what Asterisk, sipX, OpenSER, etc. are solving.
- The answer from the FreeSwitch developers was that it is really complementary to those other projects and focus on scalability and stability. It is NOT focused on the PBX space but really at the carrier space and looking at large-scale implementations. Several people also mentioned using it as a Session Border Controller (SBC).
- So is it an open source SBC?
- One carrier representative involved with the project indicated that in their testing they are getting 2,000 to 3,000 simultaneous calls up with media streaming… and at least 10,000 simultaneous calls with point-to-point media.
- Perhaps that is the focus… but I would say that the FreeSwitch folks need to refine that message…
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And so ETel begins…
Continue Reading: And so ETel begins…Today starts the first day of ETel, a.k.a. O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference. ETel is not one of the giant conferences… unlike one of the VONs, Internet Telephony or VoiceCon there will probably only be 500-1000 people here. But that is part of the charm, really (and this is only the second year)… it’s a place for the VoIP alpha-geeks to network, promote their visions, combine their visions, socialize and otherwise just learn a heck of a lot from each other. The schedule is packed with great info… the speaker roster is a veritable “Who’s Who” of people playing in the “Voice 2.0” or “Telephony 2.0” (or <pick your cliche term>) space. All in all, it’s one conference I’ve been very much looking forward to. Just in town last night, I’ve already run into Alec Saunders, Brad Templeton, Bruce Stewart, Surj Patel… had dinner with Blue Box podcast co-host Jonathan Zar and security researcher Shawn Merdinger… I know Ken Camp is around, Andy Abramson, Om Malik and so many others… it should be a great and fun conference.
For my part, I am doing two sessions. First, today at 1:30pm Pacific, Jonathan, Shawn and I will be doing a 90-minute workshop…
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Skype Journal picks up my Skype 3.1/SkypeFind review…
Continue Reading: Skype Journal picks up my Skype 3.1/SkypeFind review…Phil Wolff asked if he could republish my review of Skype 3.1 and SkypeFind over on Skype Journal and with the re-pub including a link back I was perfectly okay about that… so there it is. My premiere as a guest blogger on Skype Journal… 🙂
Welcome to anyone who landed here after visiting Skype Journal. You’ll find I do talk about Skype here, although it’s just one of the many topics. If you find my writing useful or helpful, feel free to subscribe via RSS or email through the right sidebar. Thanks for stopping by!
Technorati tags: skype journal, skype -
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Tom Keating reviews "pbxnsip", an inexpensive IP-PBX based on Windows with a focus on security
Continue Reading: Tom Keating reviews "pbxnsip", an inexpensive IP-PBX based on Windows with a focus on securityNoticed today that Tom Keating has a review up on “pbxnsip“, which has the interesting twist of being a low-cost PBX solution running on Microsoft Windows. Most other inexpensive or open-source software-only PBX solutions tend to run on Linux, and indeed, pbxnsip does have Linux versions (and apparently NetBSD although they are not listed… perhaps they just run the Linux version). I first actually learned of pbxnsip some time ago at one of the various VoIP tradeshows when I was struck by the fact that they were advertising security as the main point in big letters on the background to their booth. In fact, security is #2 on their list of “reasons to buy”:
It addresses security. The pbxnsip PBX uses https, sips, SRTP and sdes to make the communication to your PBX secure. Using sdes-capable devices, your voice calls will stay as secure as your https traffic.
Well, gee, given my background, it’s not hard to imagine that any vendor that basically leads with security gets some extra points in my book. (Especially since doing so has the potential to paint a big red target on your back to all the attackers out there who like to debunk claims…
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Skype takes on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in local business listings with new "SkypeFind" – and ratings/reviews
Continue Reading: Skype takes on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in local business listings with new "SkypeFind" – and ratings/reviewsSkype today released a new “3.1” beta for Windows (you can get it here) with a number of minor tweaks – and a brand new component called “SkypeFind”. As you can see in the picture to the right, there’s a new tab added… and is the entrance of Skype into the game already being played by GoogleMaps, Yahoo!Local and Microsoft’s Windows Live Local… namely… providing an easily searchable directory of businesses.
It’s not stated, but it’s pretty clear the ultimate goal is to control the directory you use to initiate calls. Think about it, Google is aiming to do this with their “click-to-call” in Google Maps. Find an entry (in the US, anyway) and simply click “call” and your regular phone rings. It’s simple and easy. Google controls the directory and the initiation of calls. It’s even more logical for Skype to do this. Find a business in the directory, click the phone number and you’re dialling away using Skype/SkypeOut…
Of course, Skype aims to be more than simply yet another business directory. As the Skype blog entry states:
SkypeFind is one of the most interesting features that we’ve done in quite a while now. We call it “Local…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…
