I’ve been suffering Mac envy in OS/hardware terms for a long time. The problem has been that nagging doubt in the back of my head that says that there will be one requirement that I can’t solve without windows (vpn being the main issue up until now). Well once Apple announced Boot Camp I realised that excuse had vanished. The only remaining one was around video games and the XBox 360 is already out pacing anything I can afford in PC graphics cards for a year or so (for the record Oblivion is dominating my time when the kids are in bed).

Earlier this month I found a minor problem with how JBoss AS deals with web service handlers returning false. It looked like a bug as I could reproduce it on both JBoss 4.0.2 and JBoss 4.0.3RC1 so I dropped a note onto the forum. I got a quick professional response agreeing that it looked like a bug, and was requested to produce a simple ear that demonstrated the fault. It was a busy day at work, so I waited until the evening to create an example.

Ah my extremely battered P900 only has a few more months to struggle on. Specs include wifi :) 11/12/05 Excellent review here although it looks like we will be waiting until at least March.

As promised an update after spending a week with Skype in the field. I’ve just returned from a week at JavaOne and used nothing else for calls. The overall summary is that it was excellent, I made around 3 hours of Skype-Skype calls, and about two hours of SkypeOut to landlines in Europe. Both where excellent, most where made from wireless connections with speeds around 2-5Mbs. The only time I had any trouble, was with an open wireless connection from a neighboring hotel that had the habit of going away from time to time, and nothing was likely to work under those conditions.

The folks at video4skype have produced a free plugin for Skype to allow a video stream to be sent along side a skype-skype call. My exstensive ( two days ;) ) testing looks good, the quality is fine depending on bandwidth. It does the traditional picture-in-picture view, I’m hoping to use this quite a bit when I’m on the road later this month to keep in touch with the kids.

I’ve written a couple of plugins for the Mars Network Monitor, Mars is a small java application that allows you to monitor certain types of web-services (http/https/jdbc etc) and trigger alerts via emai/popup etc when a service cannot be contacted. A couple of years ago I wrote a plugin to allow the notification of a problem to be sent via Jabber which was added to the release. The new plugins are for notification of problems via AOL instant message or SMS message.

Back in March I bought one of these Dual Phones to see how they worked out. Its a normal DECT phone that also connects to Skype through a PC. The phone rings when a Skype call comes in, and you can talk wirelessly for the range of the phone. The phone also keeps you informed of users coming online/offline and allows you to make SkypeOut (calls to landlines), normal Skype and landline calls from the same handset.

I’ve mentioned Skype before, and things just get better and better with this service. Around three weeks ago I took out the 30euro option to get on the beta of SkypeIn/answer service. This gives me an ordinary London based telephone number which will divert to any location that I am logged into Skype. If I’m not logged into Skype then the call gets directed to an answer service and they get the option to leave a message (this is also the case for normal Skype calls to).

One of our corporate clients has an authenticating web proxy and no other external links through the firewall (that I can find). It turns out that OpenVPN can work completely through SSL - i.e. if you tell OpenVPN about the proxy/authentication it will connect through the SSL proxy to the vpn server and setup a tunnel. This is sensational for us as it now means I can show demonstrations of our work running against our own test databases to the business users.

I make quite a few international calls and in the past I had played with Skype and had quite a few problems setting it up alongside NAT and the local firewall. Well today I found a voucher for some free airtime using SkypeOut in amongst a headset I have bought so I thought I would give it a try. I installed the latest Skype beta for XP (Linux/Mac clients are also available) and it just works fine.