Monthly Archives: March 2008

sipme.com.au and Asterisk

For any Asterisk users out there using sipme as their Voice-over-IP provider who, like me, have been banging their heads against walls trying to figure out why it isn’t working, it turns out that sometime in early February, they made a change to their SIP proxy setup and elected not to mention it on their website.

Their new equipment apparently doesn’t like talking to Asterisk, so to make it work, it’s necessary to mask the user agent string by putting the following in the [general] section of your sip.conf file:

useragent=portasipfriendly

…which I found out only after considerably websearching let me stumble upon this thread in Whirlpool.

Evidentally, I haven’t made any non-Melbourne phone calls for almost two months, or I’d have discovered this earlier.

Don’t talk to the dead. That’d be, like, weird.

Sydney’s Anglican archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen, doesn’t seem to appreciate the irony
of his own statements:

Dr Jensen has also warned people against dabbling in the supernatural.

He says those who are grieving over the death of a family member or friend should not try and contact them.

“This is very dangerous – meddling in the occult is never a good idea,” he said.

I agree. Talking to supernatural beings and thinking that the dead might somehow resurrect themselves after, say, two days, is just plain strange.

Fixing pidgin’s UI regression

It doesn’t look like the user interface changes to Pidgin that I detailed here are going to go away any time soon, despite much concern about it. Last thing I read was that the developers had invoked the Gnome Defence, in that having too many useful features results in bloat (of course, no-one ever seems to remember that removing too many useful features results in Epiphany).

So, given that I simply cannot stand using it with the new interface, I’ve thrown together a very simple patch and a Debian package, replacing the chat window interface with that from an older version.

Pidgin: dumb user interface changes

I don’t know why application developers get sudden ideas to make significant user interface changes such as this:

Apparently it is intended behaviour, and there are a number of people who aren’t very happy about it.

I rank this one up there with the one where Galeon had all its options and features removed.