VoIP and some agonies of E.164 or, Forward Into The Past!

Does anyone else remember CompuServe accounts, which were all numbers? Mine was 72125,1424. Or ICQ, which was fun to guess just when the other person signed up by the numeric value of their ICQ account. I'm glad to see ICQ is still operating, which maybe I should have noticed before. I wonder if my old number still works?

Now people use names for their email, in a standard and well understood form that works seamlessly between different service providers. Me@example.com is far more understandable than 72125,1424 ever was.

Abandon Skype all ye who enter here

With the purchase of Skype by Microsoft, there's a question that has been bugging me for quite a while.

Why Skype?

What properties made Skype the 800lbs gorilla of software phones?

I think I have a few ideas.

1) Video. Even though it took a while to get video working on Linux, it does work and works pretty well.

Looking up old friends.

Recently, I have thought about looking up old friends. Like from highschool. Or early girlfriends. People like that.

What has been very hard to keep in mind is that I have made no secret of my identity on the "interwebs". My existence on the 'Net has been rather obvious, from early posts on NANOG and Rec.Motorcycles to the present.

This creates a conflict of interest, of sorts.

Microsoft devours Skype

Skype has been purchased by Microsoft, for $8.5 Billion.

I have used Skype for years on Linux, even though Skype treated their Linux client as something like a red-headed step-child. Features like video chat were always included in the Linux client long after they were in the Windows version, bug fixes were slow, stuff like that.

But, and here's the biggest thing: It worked.

Windows Is Not Free

Three years ago, I read one of the finest articles on the issues concerning the difficulties faced by the advocates of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS or FOSS), and the endless efforts to get people to give F/OSS an opportunity to work for them.

The article is "Windows Is Free: The Impact of Pirated Software on Free Software", along with the follow up article by the same author, "No Really - Windows Is Free."

I am now a Linux Kernel Developer

No joke.

On Sunday, March 20th, I submitted a patch to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, to fix a compile problem that began when the "binutils" package, that handles programs written in assembly, was updated such that something that was never a problem before became a problem.

The file linux-2.6.38/arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.S had two places where the "END(foo)" did not match the "foo" in its "ENTRY(foo)". The file dates back to 1992, so this problem has been there the whole time and no one noticed because it didn't cause an error until now.

I have no idea if the patch will be accepted, or even noticed, but I've done it and now anyone who gets the compile error...


arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.S: Assembler messages:
arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.S:1422: Error: .size expression does not evaluate to a constant make[3]: *** [arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.o] Error 1


...will know what it is about and how to fix it if my patch doesn't make it into the kernel.

"Dum vivimus, vivamus! -- 'While we live, let us live!' "

A friend just pointed me to this video:

This reminds me of why I keep my motorcycle, even though it's spent year after year in various garages while I traveled or did more "important" things.

Robert Heinlein explained why in his book _Glory Road_:

"Dum vivimus, vivamus! -- 'While we live, let us live!' "


When the hero was asked by a very pretty woman what the inscription on his sword meant, the hero said,

"Touch life. Touch life twice!"