I read from Jeff Pulver‘s blog that the FCC granted his petition to declare FWD an information service. This is great news for the budding VoIP industry, though it still leaves questions unanswered.
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Look like the building where I work may be getting a generator. We’ve had electricians in today installing an automatic transfer switch. This should help put an end to the bizarre power outages where one bus goes down, leaving us 80 volts of electricity instead of the usual 120.

Still, there’s no sign of the actual generator, so there’s no telling when it will actually happen. And besides, what will I have left to complain about?

I’ve been revisiting my idea for combining the power of Bittorrent to TiVo-like boxes. One little-known project which does just this is called konspire (and kast). It provides Bittorrent-like distribution of virtually any media. Even offers “channels” and ranking of sources.

From this page describing kast:

kast is similar to a blogging system in that you can use it to regularly “post” new content to a group of readers. Of course, a blog, like any website, has limited bandwidth. Thus, the kinds of content you can post to a blog are usually limited to text and pictures, especially for popular blogs that are read by many people. By leveraging the distribution power of konspire2b, you can use kast to post files of any size to essentially as many readers as you want.

[…]
a free radio or television station

using konspire2b, you can run a multimedia channel that reaches a large audience. As with any broadcast system, your receivers need to be “tuned in” (with their kast nodes on and subscribed) in order to receive particular broadcasts. However, as long as your receivers have their nodes on during your broadcast, they can interact with the received content later at their leisure. For video distribution, this makes konspire2b more like TiVo than ordinary television. Also, with konspire2b, you are not just limited to sending audio or video: you can send any kind of file.

Kast fits the bill for sharing content, especially content that is user-generated. It comes so close to meeting my needs that I’m surprised it took me so long to discover it. Right now, however, it’s about as useful as Alexander Bell’s first telephone: great concept, but if no one else is using it, its a doorstop.

Download kast, put in some content, and help change the face of media.

(I’m running out of bad puns. Send help.)

I finally got sound between my Packet8 DTA310 and Asterisk (or more specifically, to Sipset running on my laptop)! It is the first time I’ve gotten any audio from the DTA310 to anything else since I dropped Packet8 service. Not to give you the wrong idea, I have to tell you that I only got audio one way: from my laptop back to the DTA310. There was nothing but silence in the phone plugged into the DTA310.

I changed so many parameters around during my testing that I have no idea what got me as far as I got. My thought is that the DTA310 uses a narrower range of RTP ports than I’ve got defined, and I got lucky by hitting upon the right port at the right time. I did manage to capture packets from some attempts, so perhaps I can find a pattern.

Another thought is that the DTA310 isn’t designed for reinviting. That is, it expects to always talk to the SIP server and not interface directly with other SIP UAs. That seems to be the way it works with the Packet8 service, so it’s plausable that the DTA310 has this limitation.

More experimenting is in order, but it seems I’m getting closer!