All posts by John Goerzen

Best $70 We’ve Spent In Quite Awhile

Entertainment / Arts

Today we got to see the first ever live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion from Kansas, at the Kansas State fair.

It was great to see the show in person (second time for me; I also saw it at Purdue back in 2001). All the jokes about Kansas were fun, too. And they even recovered fine when — I kid you not — the wind at the grandstand blew all their music, notes, and scripts away. Twice.

Cliff, if you were listening, the bit about the bloggers for some reason made me think of you ;-)

I’d like to close this post with this, posted by NotInKansasAnymore to the discussion board for tonight’s broadcast:

You’re a true Kansan if:

1. You no longer associate bridges or rivers with water.

2. You have never met any celebrities (Bob Dole isn’t a celebrity;
he’s your neighbor.)

3. You know the meaning of Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

4 Your closest neighbor is more than a mile away and you can still

see him from your front porch.

5. You can properly pronounce Salina, Basehor, Cimmaron,
Schoenchen, Kechi and Osawatomie.

6. Going on vacation means going to Hutch to the fair or to Abilene
to Ike’s museum.

7. A traffic jam involves two cars staring each other down at a
four-way stop, each determined to be the most polite and let the

other go first.

8. A Mercedes Benz is not a status symbol. A Ford F10 4×4 is.
(Except in Johnson County)

9. You discover that in July it takes only 2 fingers to drive your
car.

10. The terms Sooners and Huskers cause hairs on the back of your
neck to stand up straight and your blood pressure to rise.

11 You have owned at least one belt buckle bigger than your fist.

12. You think people who complain about the wind and weather in
their states are SISSIES!

13. You are not surprised to find movie rentals, ammunition and
bait all in the same store.

14. You know that the true value of a parking space is not
determined by the distance to the door but by the availability of

shade.

15. You have been asked, “Where is Toto” more than once.

16. You had at least one summer job that was bucking bales or
custom cutting.

17. More than once you’ve made a beer run to another state.

18. You learned how to shoot a gun before you learned to multiply.

19. Your school classes have been canceled because of the cold.

20. You know in your heart that K-State can beat Oklahoma in
football.

21. Traffic congestion is ten cars waiting to pass a combine on the
highway.

22. You have had to switch from heat to A/C in the same day.

23. You know everything goes better with Ranch.

24. Your school classes have been canceled because of the heat.

25. You have ridden the school bus for more than an hour each way.

26. In August, you break a sweat the instant you step outside at
7:00 a.m.

27. You instantly know someone is from Johnson County when they
call everything west of Topeka… “Western” Kansas.

28. A tornado warning siren is your signal to go out in the yard
and look for a funnel.

29. You know the real way to pronounce the name of the river…
arKANSAS.

30. You think the opening day of pheasant season is a national
holiday.

31. “Vacation” means going to Kansas City or Wichita for the
weekend.

32. You measure distance in hours.

33. You know several people who have hit more than one deer.

34. You see people wearing hunting clothes at social events.

35. You install security lights on your house and garage and leave
both unlocked.

36 You think of the major food groups as beer, beef and beans.

37. You carry jumper cables in your car and make sure your better

half knows how to use them.

38. You design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.

39. You know the four seasons as: summer, road construction, still
summer, winter.

40. It takes you 3 hours to go to the store for one item even when
you’re in a rush because you have to stop and talk to everyone in town.

41. You lock the doors to your truck but leave the windows rolled

down.

42. You call sodas just plain ol’ “Pop”!!

43. FINALLY….. you are 100% Kansan if……….. You actually
understand these jokes and forward them to all your friends from
Kansas.

Hurricane Accountability

General

Take a look at this excellent post from Rhodent, full of first-hand hurricane experience. Lots of good points there.

But I’m going to disagree with two ;-)

First, I think that we’ve seen colossal failures at all levels of government. Congress should have appropriated the money to strengthen the levees years ago, when New Orleans officials first asked for it. The local authorities should have provided transportation out for people. The federal authorities should have been better positioned to help, and should have had more people on the ground (or at least dropping food from the air) sooner. There’s no excuse for the feds saying they can’t get food in when private groups could, or for saying they didn’t know anybody was in the convention center when it had been on the news for days. There’s also no excuse for the Louisiana emergency management services relying on cellphones for communication in a disaster.

Second, I think she’s right to say that the “blame game” (fingerpointing) is terrible. But I think that accountability is vital. The disaster is still in progress and lives are still at stake. If relief efforts are being so poorly managed that they are endangering people or prolonging suffering, then we need to remove these poor managers and replace them with good ones immediately. This *is* the time to see if the government is responding well and to do something about it if not. Not 6 months later when it won’t make as much difference to victims of the current disaster. When you see a problem, you should respond to it.

Lots of questions about FEMA Chief Brown

Politics

Very interesting stuff.

First, a Time investigation into his resume, including statements released by the White House at the time of his nomination. Many of them turn out to be not quite true. He also was fired from not just the horse association, but a law firm as well.

A report on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday included an interesting interview with a journalist that has done some work on the topic. Among the interesting quotes from Brown are: that he was never told that this hurricane could be any worse than others (untrue, according to the weather forecaster that briefed him), that FEMA had no way of knowing people were at the convention center in New Orleans until 3 days after the hurricane hit (Ted Koppel asked him, “Don’t you have TV? We’ve been reporting on this for days.”)

This guy sounds like a total liar to me. He should be fired immediately, and somebody competant put in charge of this operation.

The Feds Think New Orleans Is Just Fine

General

The Big Disconnect in New Orleans, in which CNN compares what federal officals say to the reality on the ground. Absolutely shocking.

One example:

# [FEMA Director] Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

# CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations.

Harry Connick Jr. on how easy it is to get into New Orleans. (Thanks, Marty, for mentioning that one).

Mayor to Feds: Get Off Your Asses (CNN)

A Can’t-Do Government (New York Times). Including this memorable quote:

“On Wednesday,” said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., “reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!”

Harry Connick Jr. Voiced some of my suspicions (blog post).

The FEMA chief blaming the victims (this is a story I wrote about earlier)

From Margins of Society to Center of Tragedy (New York Times)

Critics Say Bush Undercut Flood Prevention Funding (Washington Post)

Where’s the foresight? The sense of urgency?

General

There are a few things that make me mad.

Watching people die for no good reason is one of them.

And that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing the last few days from the New Orleans area. There are heroic efforts on the ground. This post is not about those true public servants, giving everything against impossible odds.

This post is about the federal and state governments.

Today — four full days after the hurricane hit — federal groups are finally arriving in meaningful numbers, though still obviously not enough. People were hungry in the streets; why did we not drop MREs (Meals ready-to-eat) from airplanes sooner?

The staggering lack of foresight in the state and federal governments in this country is maddening. It has come to light that, in years past, despite the efforts of the mayor of New Orleans, both the (democratic) Louisiana state government and (republican) federal administration did very little to help them improve the levees. Bush even refused multiple direct requests from the mayor to tour the area (well prior to the hurricane).

Louisiana emergency management officials went on TV earlier this week claiming that they couldn’t do much because their cellphones and blackberries were out. Think a little bit, folks — did you really expect cellphone towers to be a reliable emergency communication network after a hurricane? Ever heard of good ole’ 2-way radios? Shortwave anyone?

What about the gas prices? Perhaps if we had been investing more money into conservation and alternative fuel technology all these years, we wouldn’t be in such a mess.

And then there’s the staggering lack of a sense of urgency. After 9/11, federal and state governments countrywide sprang into action. After this hurricane, FEMA…. manages to have no idea where the victims are. Bush goes out playing a guitar. Other top officials seem to have a “life as usual” attitude. People are dying out there, and these officials see no need to try to make the bureacratic wheels turn faster to help them out?

FEMA was a particularly interesting case. On an interview with NPR yesterday, NPR reporters asked the director about all the suffering at the New Orleans convention center. The director flat-out asserted there was nobody at the convention center, accusing NPR’s reporters of being mistaken or lying. A staff member called NPR back half an hour later to say that they had now learned that there were people at the convention center.

But here’s what really takes the cake: FEMA officials saying that they shouldn’t do much because people chose to stay and their predicament is their own fault.

I think they need to get out a little more. They need to realize that many people have no means to evacuate, and no means to pay for a hotel once they’re gone. Some are too sick to move, or are caring for loved ones that are too sick to move. Some are too young or old. Many Americans don’t own a car, because they can’t afford it. Think about it: if you had no money, no car, and nowhere to go anywhere else, what would you do?

So yes, I am ticked at my government and extremely annoyed that my tax dollars are paying for a federal “response” that takes days to even meaningfully begin.

Digikam

Software

Back when I first got my digital camera (a Canon Digial Rebel), I knew I had to find some sort of program to keep track of my photos. I looked at many different programs on Linux, but none of them really did what I wanted. I’ve used some iView software on the Mac some times. While it can do what I want, its database is proprietary, which annoys me. It means, among other things, I can’t write my own programs to pull data from that database.

Lately I’ve been checking out the Linux photo management scene again, and I’ve got to say that digiKam is quite the impressive piece of work.

It has a versatile database, nice interface, and loads of features. Its database uses sqlite, so writing my own programs to work with it will be a snap. I’ve been using version 0.7.x, and it looks like the 0.8.x beta will address all of my few remaining complaints.

I’m moving everything over to digiKam.

Kudos to the digiKam deveopers.

Google Talk And Skype Are Boring, And Here’s Why

Technology

It seems that everywhere I turn on the web these days, people are excited about Google Talk and/or Skype. “Real voice conversations over the Internet for free,” people say.

True.

But, at least in the case of Skype, you are hooked into a single vendor, and at the mercy of that vendor. (I don’t know about Google Talk’s network specifically.) Neither one has done anything really innovative, either. Neither has any features that SIP doesn’t.

Really, both Google Talk and Skype are “been there, done that” technologies. And what’s more, far superior technologies exist.

So in response to all this undeserved hype, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about SIP and why I find it much more exciting for voice conversations.

What SIP Is

Put very simply, SIP, in its most common incarnation, is a protocol for carrying voice conversations over IP networks. It is used for everything from calling the kids in college from a home PC, to massive telecommunications infrastructure by some of the largest multinational corporations in the world. Wikipedia has a technical description of SIP, and you may note that some other protocols (such as RTP) are involved. For most purposes, though, these types of calls are called just “SIP”.

SIP is an open industry standard. They are players of all sizes in the SIP marketplace — from giants like Cisco, to “home VOIP” companies like Vonage, to small non-profits offering free calling services.

First, let’s take a look at some use cases for SIP. Then, I’ll describe all the variety available in the SIP marketplace, and give some examples of why it beats out Skype so easily.

SIP for free IP-to-IP calling

If you are using Skype or Google Talk on your PC, to talk to someone else over the Internet also using a PC, you are using what I’ll call “IP-to-IP” calling. That is, your call never hits the traditional (PSTN — Public Switched Telephone Network) phone system. It is carried 100% on the Internet.

This is trivial with SIP. At its most rudimentary, you can connect to someone else by giving their IP address and a “phone number” to connect to at that IP. In practice, this is rather inconvenient and is rarely used.

Rather, most people use a service such as Free World Dialup (FWD) for IP-to-IP calls. It’s completely free and works with any SIP phone. You just sign up and get how ever many FWD “phone numbers” you want. You can be as simple as you like, and treat it like Skype, or you can set up voicemail, PBX systems, whatever. A little-known fact about FWD is that they have peering agreements with many commercial VOIP providers, letting you call into and out of the FWD network for free if you’re a customer of one of these providers (or know one).

SIP for IP-to-PSTN calling

Many people are using SkypeOut, which lets you place a call from your PC to a phone on the PSTN (traditional phone network). They charge approximately $0.023/min USD for this service. With Skype, this is pretty much your only choice.

If you’re using SIP, you have — and this is no exaggeration — hundreds or thousands of choices. Personally, I use and recommend Voxee, which charges $0.011/min USD for this service, and that’s without any sort of bulk buying arrangements. SkypeOut is more than twice as expensive.

There are plenty of other options — Vonage is one that targets residential customers, and there are others that target large corporations that sell minutes in blocks of 1 million.

In SIP lingo, a company that provides IP-to-PSTN calling is known as a “termination provider” — that is, they “terminate” your call onto the PSTN.

SIP for PSTN-to-IP calling

As far as I know, Skype does not support this. (Update: there are some sketchy details on SkypeIn; see comments below.)

Many of the SIP providers linked to above also provide the reverse: they will, for a small monthly rate (often under $5), sell you a local number. When someone calls that number, the call is routed over the Internet to your VOIP system as if someone had called from another VOIP node on the Internet. Rates are usually quite low on these as well, even for 800 numbers.

In SIP lingo, companies that provide this service are said to provide “DID” (Direct Inward Dial) service.

In addition to the above, there are some other general purpose PSTN-to-IP gateways. IPKall, for instance, links regular PSTN numbers into the FWD network.

SIP Phones

With Skype, any device that you are using must be used with a PC that is running the Skype software. That may not seem like a problem to you, but it can be a surprising limitation.

Of course, there are plenty of PC-based phones available for SIP. They are called “softphones”, and there are dozens available.

You can also find “hardphones”, which are implemented in hardware. These phones require no PC to operate. They typically have an RJ-45 Ethernet jack only, and all they need is a network connection and the name of a server (or two) to go. A person could have no PC in the house at all and have a working SIP hardphone, no problem.

There are dozens of these available as well. I personally have several Sipura SPA-841 phones, which sell for about $80. Very nice. Work right out of the box, but also highly configurable.

There are also a few of SIP hardphones that use 802.11b Wifi instead of Ethernet. This market is growing.

SIP Analog Telephone Adapters

Perhaps you’d rather keep the traditional analog phone that you already have, instead of buying a new phone. No problem, you can buy SIP Analog Telephone Adapters (ATAs). ATAs for personal use sell for under $100. They typically have two ports: an RJ-45 Ethernet port, and an RJ-11 phone port. Plug in the Ethernet and phone, point it at the appropriate server(s), and you’re set. They provide dialtone, caller ID, ring voltage, etc. as appropriate to the analog phones. Once again, no need for a PC.

In more advanced settings (see below), you can also use a different type of ATA to go the other way: to integrate a line from the PSTN into your VOIP setup. More on that below.

Be Your Own Provider

You can run professional, industrial-strength PBX systems in your own home with a program such as Asterisk. This gives you all the features you’d expect from a “business” phone system: multiple extensions, voice mail, automatic call routing using least expensive lines, etc.

I’ve written about my Asterisk setup and given some details on Asterisk before, so I won’t go into a whole lot of detail here.

Suffice it to say that you can really go places with SIP and Asterisk. You can use an ATA to let your outgoing VOIP calls get routed over a PSTN line, or the Internet, depending on costs and whether the appropriate lines are available. You can get bulk concentrators, connecting dozens or hundreds of analog phone lines to a VOIP server at once. There are a bunch of options.

Common Questions

Here are some questions you may have:

What is the sound quality of SIP?

There are many different protocols, some compressed, some not, that are frequently used with SIP. In general, over my DSL link, I find SIP calls to sound better than calls I place with a traditional phone.

Is it hard to set up?

A basic setup, similar to what you would use with Google Talk or Skype, is really very easy. FWD has a nice Quick Start Guide that you might want to check out.

Obviously, if you are setting up a PBX with Asterisk on Linux, you will need a bit more expertise.

Is SIP here to stay?

Unquestionably yes. There are very big names (Linksys, Cisco, Nortel, Earthlink, SBC, etc.) using SIP. There are also community organizations that use it. It will be here for a long time.

Where can I find more information?

If you have some basic questions, you can post comments here and I will try to help you out. (I will not reply to e-mailed questions.) I highly recommend the VOIP Wiki at Voip-Info.Org. It is a thorough and amazing resource that I have referred to on many occasions.

Is it available globally?

Yes, all over the world. VoIP User, for instance, is a community-run PSTN termination service in the UK. Public and private organizations exist all over, though.