Category: IT

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Free SIP client Gizmo: “Blind date” with Josef Estermann?

After having read about Gizmo in today’s issue of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger (article not (yet?) online, unfortunately), I wanted to check it out myself. Downloaded it, installed it, did some echoing tests. Everything fine – Gizmo seems to be a pretty useful VoIP client, even in its early stage (v0.8 beta). It offers full SIP/VoIP compatibility (something Skype doesn’t offer), built-in call recording capability (dito), call in and out as a gateway to the POTS (as usual). As a first impression, Gizmo seems to be equal to or even better than Skype.

Now comes the funny side note: As most other software vendors entering a market where success heavily depends on network effects, Gizmo has a so-called tell-a-friend page. I usually ignore such pages as if, I prefer notifying friends myself (in order to not give someone else’s e-mail address to a potentially sneaky service provider) instead of sending an invitation through a web form. However, by clicking on a GUI element I just happened to be forwarded to this page.
The funny (or strange) thing about that page now is that if you take a close look at the bottom of the page, you can actually spot a picture of the former (and IMHO one of the best ever) president/mayor of the City of Zurich, Josef Estermann! The Gizmo guys were even unknowing or impudent enough to take his picture as a representative for the tell-a-friend message “Blind Date” (note that as far as I know, Mr. Josef Estermann is happily married to Mrs. Maggy Estermann):

I bet there are many ladies (and gentlemen, for equality) who’d like to have a blind date with Mr. Estermann (though it probably wouldn’t be a blind date anymore). I seriously doubt, however, that Josef Estermann agreed to have his picture taken for this advertisement. It might be just an unconscious mistake by Gizmo’s marketing department or the work of careless copy-cats. I guess it’s rather a funny coincidence/mishap than maliciousness, though ;)

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Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition

A pointer by Tobias Klauser on the debian-unizh ml just reminded me of this great (and free! :) book:

LWN: Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition

Citing the authors:

This is the web site for the Third Edition of Linux Device Drivers, by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. For the moment, only the finished PDF files are available; we do intend to make an HTML version and the DocBook source available as well.

This book is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. That means that you are free to download and redistribute it. The development of the book was made possible, however, by those who purchase a copy from O’Reilly or elsewhere.

LDD3 is current as of the 2.6.10 kernel. See the LWN 2.6 API changes page for information on subsequent changes.

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“Reverse roadmap order” patch for Trac

If you prefer a descending order (like in changelogs, blogs, etc.) for milestones in roadmaps instead of an ascending one (= default), you might want to apply my tiny patch:

Roadmap.py.patch

It applies to Roadmap.py of Trac 0.8.4 (see ‘locate Roadmap.py’).

Note that this patch both sets a reverse chronological and a reverse alphabetical order for milestones. Like this, you can name your milestones like versions (e.g. “0.2”, “0.4” .. “1.0”) and they will still appear in reverse order (even if they don’t have any associated dates).

If you want a reverse chronological only order (while keeping an ascending alphabetical order), set “name” instead of “name DESC” in the SQL statements of Roadmap.py.

Note that iCal will not be affected by the display order of the items on Trac.

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“Deny project listing” patch for Trac

If you’d like to disable the project listing (“Available projects”) in Trac 0.8.4 when using mod_python (highly recommended as it greatly improves Trac’s responsiveness), you might want to use my tiny patch:

ModPythonHandler.py.patch

Apply it by executing

# patch

in Trac’s source code directory (see the result of ‘locate Changeset.py’). On Gentoo, the directory is /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/trac/. Note that you don’t need this patch if you’re using the current trunk version of Trac (at the time of writing). In trunk, you can define your own custom template for the project listing.