SIPphone

I recently had my first SIPphone experience. For those unfamiliar with the service, SIPphone is Michael Robertson’s (mp3.com founder) new VoIP venture, firmly focused on providing Internet telephony to the masses. I found it a solution that, despite initial configuration issues, provides a good low-cost entry to the world of internet-based telephony.

SIPphone resells BudgeTone phones from Grandstream Networks, and host the necessary proxy and directory servers that provide the core of their VoIP telephony service.

SIPphone pitch their offering as a ‘just plug in’ experience – however my experience, within a corporate network environment, was a little more complicated. Given the average uPNP-enabled router commonly found in home and small business networks, I would foresee the process being a little easier in those environments than what I experienced.
The phone was, initially, behind a firewall. This particular firewall implements some pretty restrictive rules and, unsurprisingly, the SIPphone did not want to co-operate. It would obtain an IP address from the local DHCP server, but would not allow any outbound or inbound calls. We did not want to relax the rules for the firewall, so we decided to continue the test by allocating the phone a public static IP address. Assigning a static IP address requires you to program the phone – either through using the keypad, or through accessing the administration interface offered up by its built-in Web server. For anyone having difficultly with either of the interfaces, I’d suggest downloading a copy of the user manual from Grandstream. Also, SIPphone hosts an active community forum as part of its support offerings.

Once the phone was reconfigured with a static IP, along with the necessary DNS server information, we were up and running. However, before running a voice test, I had to unplug the phone and move it to a different location. Upon restoring power, I noticed that my settings had been reset to their defaults. This was a little confusing, as I had not forced a reset of the configuration parameters. It materializes that the phone was contacting a SIPphone-hosted TFTP server and downloading a configuration update that was overwriting my IP settings. It seems like the centralized provisioning and management service for these phones does not allow a local override of the IP settings. When the phone downloads configuration from the TFTP server, any local updates to the IP configuration are overridden. I’m sure SIPphone could set our IP configuration within the phone’s file on their TFTP server, but I’d like to have the flexibility to make these changes locally. I’m sure their support team has had to field a few calls regarding this problem. In the end, set the TFTP address to 0.0.0.0 within the phone’s configuration, disabling the remote configuration update.

Once the IP issues had been resolved, I finally got a chance to make some calls. SIPphone has some carrier agreements in place that allow you to dial 1-800 calls from the phone. This is great for access calling card services, and I could see this being a real cost-saver to people working overseas who need to contact people not connected to the VoIP network. SIPphone also has routing agreements with other VoIP initiatives, such as Pulver’s Free World Dialup.

Now, on to the phone itself. The BudgeTone phones are cost-effective VoIP terminals. They’re comparable to a $20-$30 POTS telephone in terms of build quality, so at $60 it is more than reasonable for a VoIP equipped phone. As far as sound quality goes, the clarity was good, with little or no jitter. There was some minor echo, although I think this is more due to the design of the phone rather than the underlying connectivity. One of the test calls was to a person also using a BudgeTone phone; the call had noticeable echo when the remote user enabled the speakerphone. I tried both national (USA) and international calls with a good level of success.

My concerns? Not too many. The hardware is flexible enough that if you had to switch from one provider (SIPphone) to another (e.g. FWD), it would require a simple reconfiguration. My only real concern is the number allocation scheme chosen by SIPphone. They’ve decided to issue numbers within the 747 area code of the North American Numbering Plan. NANPA currently indicates that this area code is geographically assigned, but not in use. At some point in the future numbers within the area code could be assigned to an entity not associated with SIPphone, potentially affecting existing SIPphone users.

All in all, SIPphone provided a good telephony experience. I’ve just noticed from the SIPphone site that they now offer free voicemail, which brings them into line with the free service offered by FWD. The cost of the hardware is very competitive, and they’ve recently announced a product that’ll let you VoIP-enable an existing phone – great for adding a cordless phone to the network. VoIP offers a number of advantages, including, of course, the low (bandwidth-dervied) call cost characteristic. SIPphone provides a low-cost way to start experiencing the benefits of Internet telephony.

Posted in VoIP | 2 Comments

Unclogging Writer’s Block

When I started this blog, I wanted it to be an outlet for my technology escapades, including coverage of the interesting topics that I encounter in and out of work. I can quite honestly say that this was not as easy as expected, but I’m determined to continue onwards and upwards. Next year I’ll be making the resolution (again) to be more creative, and to generate more content. Part of that includes publishing more content to my blog, and possibly publishing through other outlets. More to come later on that particular subject.
Anyway, back to the original point. In my quest to provide fresh content in my blog, and not to become just a blog-of-links, I’m trying to make some persistent notes about that topics that I’ll cover at some undetermined point in the future.

Here are my current areas of interest:

  • Scalable transaction technologies, especially high-performance transaction-grade persistent mechanisms and their applicability to the realm of Enterprise connectivity (Web Services + more)
  • Web Services: A term encapsulating an ever-growing range of standards and specifications. As I look to 2004, I wonder what level of convergence we will see amongst the different standards groups. Of particular interest are the standards focused on making Web Services enterprise-grade (specifically Reliable Messaging, Transaction Management and Security/Identity), but as a whole I’m intrigued to see how the marketplace will overcome Web Services’ growing complexity. In addition, the whole idea of managing the contractual environment between the providers and consumers of Web Services is of interest (see this recent post by Nick Gall for an insight into this area).
  • XML-driven database technologies and their potential for managing and querying semantic-rich data (Syncato is probably one of the first projects to realize the true value of this type of environment)
  • Emerging VoIP technologies – the progress of SIP et. al. I recently tested SIPphone, and will shortly be publishing an entry about that particular experience.
  • … and, of course, the ongoing developments within the realm of content publication and syndication. There has recently been a lot of activity within the Atom camp. Will 2004 be its year of flourishment?

I’m sure more topics will come along as well. Everyday I’m reading about various interesting technologies, and I have to thank guys like Erik Thauvin for helping expedite my reading process. I hope to have to chance to drill-down into some additional technologies, but, as always, this activity is time-pending. I appreciate your comments and feedback, and if you happen to come across any interesting articles relevant to the aforementioned subject areas, I’d be very glad to receive a link.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Unclogging Writer’s Block

Smart Orange 0.3

quickSub 0.3 has just been released. Thanks go to Colin Grady (aka pr00f) for the inspiration from his work on quickSub over at Feedster.

Posted in quickSub | Comments Off on Smart Orange 0.3

The SourceForge Mirage Effect

I have now started to regularly experience what I will class as the ‘SourceForge Mirage Effect.’ Let me explain this phenomenon with a common scenario:

You’re working on your latest project, and would like to find an Open Source component to expedite development. You’ve already checked Apache and its Jakarta projects, and have returned empty-handed.

You then decide to head to the mecca of Open Source projects, SourceForge. After choosing a few choice search terms, you click the ‘Search’ button and BAM! The search results come back, and there at the top of your list is Xyz4J. You take a look at the description, and it sounds perfect. Xyz4J has everything you’re looking for – and more.  Now, just as your expectations have been built up, you click on the project name, and are taken to the project page where you are greeted with the following information:

Activity Percentile (last week): 0%

This Project Has Not Released Any Files

CVS Repository ( 0 commits, 0 adds )

You’ve just experienced the SourceForge Mirage Effect.

My one request to the SourceForge team: Add a checkbox on the main page search for ‘Only search projects with released files.’

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments

Enterprise Integration Patterns

Gregor Hohpe, Enterprise Integration Practice leader over at Thoughtworks, maintains the excellent Enterprise Integration Patterns website. This site, and the recently released book, provide a detailed description of common patterns found throughout Enterprise architectures. Well worth a visit.

Posted in Technology | Comments Off on Enterprise Integration Patterns

Java Performance Analysis Tools

This list of profiling tools is mostly a personal aide-memoire, but it may be useful to others as well. If there are any glaring omissions, or you have any thoughts about the tools listed below, please feel free to leave a comment.

Commercial

Open Source

Posted in Java | Comments Off on Java Performance Analysis Tools

A Pythonesque Approach to Spam

… otherwise known as my Spambayes experience, day 7.

spambayes.png

In my quest to resolve my spam issues (as described in a previous entry), I decided to try out SpamBayes, a popular open source Bayesian filter implemented in Python. This seemed to fit the bill for me: it works as a POP3 Proxy, providing a non-invasive spam filtering solution for my existing mail client, Outlook Express (OE). It also seemed like a good exercise to give me some exposure to Python, a language and environment I’ve yet to spend much time exploring.

Spambayes works by sitting in-between OE and my email servers. As OE retreives my email, Spambayes sits in the middle, monitoring for potential spam. If any email is determined to be spam, it prefixes the subject of the message with ‘spam,’.
Installation was pretty straightforward. After installing the latest release of Python (including obligatory Windows reboot), Python Win32 Extensions (for Windows Service support), and SpamBayes itself, I was up and running in a matter of minutes. I had to make a couple of changes to my Outlook Express account configuration to talk to SpamBayes’ POP3 and SMTP proxies instead of my hosting accounts’ servers, and then I was ready to start canning the spam. I configured a mail rule within Outlook Express to redirect any message whose subject began with “spam,” to a Spam Mail folder. I then proceeded to check for new mail, and immediately messages began to collect within the spam folder.

So, on to the pros and cons: It took me about 5-10 minutes to get the software installed and up and running. For an Outlook Express user like myself, the installation is a little more involved than that for Outlook users, who have a prepackaged Windows installer. Still, that aside, the process wasn’t too complicated. Configuring Spambayes was straightforward, and didn’t require too much work to get it going.

I’d certainly like something that has tighter integration into my mail client. Given that I’m still using Outlook Express, I think I’m pretty constrained by its lack of support for plug-ins. If I do move to a different email client, I’ll certainly be looking for something that has better integration. Also, there seems to be some form of conflict when updating Spambayes’ configuration. This requires you to stop and restart Spambayes before you’re able to perform any classifications within its web interface. My other concern – and I guess this is because I’m still in an evaluation mode – I’d hate for the effort I put into training to be wasted. If there was some standardized way that I could extract the rule corpus – just like you can extract list of RSS feeds as an OPML blogroll from your aggregator – I’d feel a bit happier. (If anyone knows whether this is possible, please leave a comment below)

Anyway, it is still early days. I’ve been using the software for the past week, and, so far, it has been pretty promising. The above image is from the Spambayes administration interface, and gives you an idea of how active it has been in detecting spam. It still needs some more training, as there are some misdetections for both Spam and ‘Ham’, however fortunately I have yet to experience any false positives. The user experience is a little disconnected, but that’s really due to the lack of integration possibilities within Outlook Express. However, I hope that once the service has passed a certain level of training, I’ll just be able to leave it running in the background.

So, it looks like Spambayes will keep my spam under control for the short term. I’m still thinking about a longer-term switch to another client with built-in spam filtering capability. Thunderbird looks like it is gathering momentum, with an imminent release of version 0.3. An evaluation is definitely on my TODO list. Look out for a write-up of my Thunderbird escapades soon…

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments

Returned mail: User unknown

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been on the receiving end of a considerable amount of spam email. “What’s so new about that?” I hear you ask. Well, in this particular case, I’m suffering from the results of bounced spam. Someone is sending out spam with the email’s ‘From’ address being a randomly created name at one of my domains. It seems as if their spam mailing list isn’t quite so up-to-date, as I’m receiving a nontrivial amount of bounced spam messages in my inbox.

Until now I’ve been pretty lax when it comes to installing some form of spam protection software. However, given this recent influx of junk, I think the time has come to be a little more pro-active. I currently use Outlook Express as my main email (and newsgroup) application, although I’m prepared to look elsewhere for something that can better handle these unwanted messages. I’m intrigued by Thunderbird, and I’d be very interested to hear from early adopters about its stability. I’m also open to exploring proxy-based alternatives, such as SpamBayes.

Any suggestions are most appreciated. In the interim, I’m doing my little bit by forwarding these bounced emails along to the appropriate abuse@insert-spammers-isp-name-here.com. Maybe they’ll be investigated, or maybe they’ll disappear into the bit-bucket along with all the other spam…

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments

Web Services Reliable Messaging – A Single Standard?

Microsoft has just published the presentations from their recent Reliable Messaging Feedback Workshop. The presentations on WS-ReliableMessaging make interesting reading, and, in conjunction with the joint briefing today by Gates and Mills, are clear indications of the momentum behind Web Services-based Reliable Messaging solutions.

An interesting point to note from the workshop’s attendee list is the presence of Fujitsu, IONA, NEC, SeeBeyond and Sonic Software. These companies represent some of the original proponents and co-sponsors of the competing standard, WS-Reliability. Is this to be taken as an indication that we’re moving towards the selection of a single specification for Reliable Messaging, or just a sign of vendors keeping their options open?

Posted in Technology | Comments Off on Web Services Reliable Messaging – A Single Standard?

Total Recall

The Internet Archive (home of the great Wayback Machine) have just launched the beta of their new service, Recall. What’s so special about this, you may ask? Well, think of it like Google, but where you are no longer restricted to searching current content. Drawing up the billions of pages stored in the Internet Archive, you can now perform a full text search across all this information. The archive contains content as far back as 1996, providing some very interesting snapshots of Internet history (early eBay, anyone?)

Very cool stuff. For those of you interested in the underlying technology behind Recall, check out Anna Paterson’s slides. It looks like they still have a few bugs to iron out, but this should prove to be a very useful research tool.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment