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. SkypeOut lets you call people who only have landlines available and the quality certainly seems acceptable. Skype-Skype calls are free and the land line rates are a little high for local calls (UK), but hands down beat our existing supplier (Telediscount) for calls into Europe.

Back in October I was having problems under Fedora Core 2 and my KVM with the mouse pointer. Adding psmouse.proto=imps was the previous fix. Well after upgrading to Core 3 that parameter is no longer needed.

The company I work for has needed some changes to the VPN solution we have been using for our “road warrior” and remote users. After experimenting with a few different packages we have adopted OpenVPN.
Its simple to setup (once you have wrestled iptables into submission) and can be configured to authenticate via x509 certificates. I was particularly impressed that under Linux 2.6.x it needs no kernel modules/modifications which we found painful with freeswan as every kernel release meant a new compile cycle.

If you ever need to get a copy of an audio stream broadcast (real etc) as a local file to time delay when you listen to it - say hypothetically that the BBC had just put a radio series online ;)

mplayer rtsp://some.host.name/astream.ra -ao pcm -aofile myfile.wav

this produces a very large wav file (about 300Mb per half hour) that can be compressed easily into an mp3 with lame via

In a previous entry I showed a configuration entry to allow the use of headless graphics generation on unix machines.

I have been evaluating yDoc which is a nice tool for generating jpg/svg UML object/class diagrams into the Javadoc process of a build phase. Its a great tool and I will be buying a copy.

The issue I had is that the ant javadoc tag doesn’t seem to honor the cruise headless command detailed earlier. After a little more searching through the javadocs for doclets I have found that you can achieve the same thing with the following tag entry :

Due to a “thermal issue*” I had to upgrade my core Linux box today. I ended up with an AMD3000 and nForce2 motherboard from Maplin as that was the current bundle on sale.
Linux did a magnificent job of just getting on with the new hardware on the reboot (in contrast to the XP partition which ended up in a re-install), the only issue was that once the new nvidia drivers had launched the mouse developed a personality all of its own. Whilst under my control for much of the time, it would occasionally have a moment where it decided to go and do its own thing. Random clicks and a preference for either the top right or bottom left of the screen can really spoil your day.

After waiting for a while, I finally upgraded my Fedora Core 1 box to Core 2. In general fairly painless and I’ve noticed some general increases in performance - the GUI is snappier and my Java applications are benchmarking 10-18% quicker.

My only real problem was that my original 9i instance will not start up under Core 2 whatever I do. I jumped through every hoop I could find on google for looking at how to deal with the dreaded shared memory issues, but nothing worked for me.

For the last month or so I’ve been writing a new production system for one of our new customers using JBoss, Hibernate and Xdoclet.
The application needs to run on several different database backends (Oracle, SQL-Server etc.) and these tools have saved me hours and hours of work. I’ve been very impressed by :

which offers a short technical guide to using hibernate.

Our coverage reports use clover as part of our cruisecontrol build. We have had some fun over time with X11 display issues when cruise calls the parts of the ant script which launches the clover graphing tool.

On a normal build you would just add -Djava.awt.headless=true on a jdk 1.4+ machine, but we struggled to get this passed to ant. Environmental variables like ANT_OPTS do not seem to be passed by cruise.

I’ve been using a tool called FindBugs for the last few months. Its a great little tool, it finds common coding errors like failing to close ResultSets etc. There is even an Eclipse plugin - so there really is no excuse not to use it.