Archive for July, 2009

The Village Telco Project

July 27, 2009 at 3:53 pm · Filed under Collaborations ·Tagged , ,

I was privileged to meet the brains behind The Village Telco Project last Wednesday. I joined them at a workshop, which was held at The Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town.  The Village Telco project is a project aimed at making Telecommunication services available for those in the rural areas. It does not mean that you and I can’t use it. I am keenly interested in getting some of the modems (called Mesh Potatoes), and I am currently thinking of what contributions I could make in the project.  Thanks a million to Steve, and I hope to see you guys (Rael – DABBA S.A., Antoine – The Shuttleworth Foundation, Elektra – Meraka Institute, David – The Free Telephony Project, Alan – Vanilla S.A., and Steve – The Shuttleworth Foundation) soon again.

The Village-telco Workshop

The Village Telco Workshop

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An interesting article about Firefox by Mitchell

July 18, 2009 at 9:48 am · Filed under Mozilla Talks

I bet you will like this intriguing article about the Mozilla Firefox. It was written by the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation Mitchell Baker.

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/06/24/firefox-in-context/

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A new feature in the TransferHTTP client – Stream to Call Service

July 16, 2009 at 9:25 pm · Filed under Mozilla Talks, Ph.D Project, Research Ideas

The TransferHTTP 1.4 Web browser extension will soon be released. There is a likelihood that it will run in Firefox 3.x. I would like to have some testers to help test the extension before being released. However, the new feature in the client is “Stream to Call.” With Stream to Call, a caller could stream a media to a callee in place of a call. It is required that a call session is setup first before a Stream to Call option is chosen, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows the SIP signalling involved in streaming a media to another web browser.

The Stream to Call Option in TransferHTTP extension

The SIP Signalling of the Stream to Call Service

Figure 2. The SIP Signalling of the Stream to Call Service

In order to distinguish the client services from the proxy services, the URL http://transferhttp.mozdev.org will contain only the TransferHTTP extension files (installer and documentation), while the URL http://transferhttp.berlios.de will contain only the TransferHTTP control services.

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TransferHTTP Control Services are here

July 6, 2009 at 8:34 pm · Filed under Ph.D Project

The control services are Web session mobility blocking and forwarding services. With these services, you could block a session transfer request sent to you. In addition, you could forward (or redirect) a session transfer request to another PC. Go to http://transferhttp.berlios.de for  more information. There are endless possibilities to what one could do with the TransferHTTP extension and its SIP Servlet application. Quoting Mulligan, “there is no ‘well-defined end-point’ for these technologies. “  Technologies here refer to the Internet, Telecommunications and their frameworks and applications, such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem and Skype. TransferHTTP Web browser extension and its SIP Servlet application are currently being extended to support more services.

References

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TransferHTTP 1.3 is out!!!

July 6, 2009 at 8:08 pm · Filed under M.Sc. Project, Ph.D Project

TransferHTTP is my Web browser extension for the Mozilla Firefox. A number of bugs have been fixed in this new version. No more frequent crash. YES! Below are some of the new features.

  • It now works in a client-server model.
  • It also reports most of the SIP Response/error messages, such as 404 (Not found) and 408 (Request Timeout).

Those are some of the newly added features; go download and install it from http://transferhttp.mozdev.org I hope to update the extension for Firefox 3.x soon. Lest I forget, I blogged on the extension here last year

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Vodacom S.A. hits back at Third-Party PCMCIA Cards

July 5, 2009 at 11:28 am · Filed under General

In the past three months, I have struggled to connect to the Internet on my laptop via a modem. Things suddenly stopped working. I lost 850MB data bundle in the process. Yes! I have always bought 1GB of data bundle monthly. What happened was that my famous PCMCIA card from Cingular, which I had been using close to two years,  stopped working. The error, when I had Vodacom sim card in it, was “modem hanged up” on Linux (Ubuntu) and an error 619 in Windows XP. After troubleshooting, I realized that Vodacom had stopped third party modems or PCMCIA cards from being used with its card. YES!! I found out that the modem could work with an MTN card, though pretty slow that I couldn’t make VOIP calls
I ended up getting the Vodafone modem (a product from Huawei Technologies), which seamlessly works with a Vodacom card to date. Below are some links to help you get your Vodacom dongle work on Ubuntu.
https://forge.betavine.net/frs/?group_id=12
http://www.geekology.co.za/blog/2009/05/configuring-vodafone-3g-modem-on-ubuntu-linux-904-jaunty-jackalope/
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?s=563134e3959d2ee028dea27b1d76f6b4&p=2930161#post2930161

Cingular and Vodafone Modems

Cingular and Vodafone Modems

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