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.
If you need to setup a VPN you really should take a look at OpenVPN.

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.