Here’s what Facebook would be like if it were to represent actions in the real world:

Would YOU let anyone do that? Enough with the poking and scrabble and superwall for heaven’s sake!

We’d already been advised to make sure to dress appropriately (in a suit), and been constantly reminded to bring our wallets. Here’s a picture documentary of what awaited us. In short, there was no more free food or drink, the pinball machines require you to put coins in (*gasp!*), and the Wii and XBox have disappeared. I think my favourite prank was the message on the printers:

The money collected today is being donated to charity.

Here’s a group shot of all those who participated:

The Google public April Fools jokes so far include Google Australia introduucing Google gDay, Gmail adding Custom Time, and Virgin and Google cooperating for Virgle. In other news, Google China’s Search is now powered by real humans and the YouTube homepage has been rickrolled (click on any featured video)! Google Book search introduces - scratch and sniff, and Google Calendar has the Wake Up Kit!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is CERN’s flagship as it’s the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. They’re having an open day next Sunday. One guess as to what I’ll be doing on Sunday. Read more about it at the Slashdot post (Imagine a Beowulf cluster of ….., uuh, never mind), the XKCD comic, or more likely the corresponding Wikipedia entry. Should one even be surprised that a botanist is claiming that powering on the LHC will hurl the earth into a parallel universe! Well, I say “go for it”, I’ve always wanted to see what a parallel universe would be like! I can’t wait for the TED talk about the LHC to become available.

I’ve recently started exploring more and more of the TED talks, finding the range of topics discussed to be both unique and eye-opening. Some of my favourite talks include Hans Rosling’s talk on debunking third world myths, James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA and Ben Dunlap on the life of Sandor Teszler. I was never a big fan of podcasts until I found the TED talks available as podcasts via iTunes. For those of you interested, here’s a direct link to the iTunes TED Talks podcast.

After installing Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer application, I’ve created an iTunes smart playlist which contains the last 3 TED talks. Ensure that this smart playlist is within the N95 sync folder, and I always have the last 3 TED talks available on my phone for when I’m in a tram or bus. The screen on the N95 is not that large, but for watching most talks this is more than enough. Mmmm…. both the N95 8GB and N96 have larger screens…

A lot of people have asked me about my home network configuration and VoIP telephone setup, so I thought I'd illustrate it here:

In the illustration, all blue arrows represent SIP communication with the annotation on the arrow representing the link layer.  The black arrows carry non IP voice traffic, potentially over GSM/UMTS or the fixed line PSTN.

At the center of everything is of course the VoIP server. In my case I'm running Asterisk on there, along with a Jabber server and a mail configuration making my mailboxes available over IMAP. A plugin installed in my OpenFire Jabber server is able to identify whether I'm on the phone or not and set my IM status accordingly. If I'm logged in to my Jabber account, I also get an IM message with extra details about incoming calls. Voicemails are stored in my IMAP mailbox and I get notified via SMS.

The top left part of the diagram illustrates the many SIP DIDs which I have registered against my server. You can often get free DIDs from providers such as SIPGate, IPKall, etc. People can thus call a local DID number and contact me, no matter where I might happen to be. There are two other possible routes for incoming calls - the Sipura 2000 and the MV370 - but we'll look at those in more detail later.

I also have multiple outgoing channels over which I can place calls into the PSTN, shown in the top right of the diagram. Then there's pure VoIP calls which are originating and terminating in the VoIP world in the right-middle of the diagram. These might be calls from VoIP networks such as Gizmo, other SIP calls, and ENUM routed calls. You can use ENUM (RFC 3761) to identify whether PSTN numbers you're trying to call might have a VoIP equivalent. If a mapped number exists, one can bypass the PSTN and route the call completely over VoIP.

Looking at the basic networking at home, I have a 25MBit Cable Modem connection to the outside world. This is connected to a WRT54GL running OpenWRT. Since the WiFi point is in the living room, I have a WET54G WiFi bridge in my study which I use to bridge the WiFi connection back to an Ethernet connection, made available through a Gigabit switch to the rest of the equipment in my study. I’ve got several VoIP devices interacting in interesting ways. First of all, all my computers are running softphone software such as X-Lite or SJPhone. Fine, softphones work, and they're available whenever you're at your computer, but sometimes you just need a real phone unit which is independent of your computer. That's where the Avaya 4620SW comes in - it's a very solid phone with a lot of functionality and it works fairly well against my Asterisk server except for the fact that the MWI indicator, as well as several other features of the phone, only work when connected against an Avaya SIP server. The Sipura SPA 2000 is a SIP ATA which lets one bridge SIP VoIP and the PSTN. Thus, incoming calls on PSTN are routed over VoIP to my server, and my server can also route calls over VoIP to the PSTN line on the Sipura. It also has an FXO port so that you can plug any standard telephone into the Sipura and have it connect to both the VoIP and PSTN lines. The PORTech MV370 is a similar device except that you place a GSM SIM in it and it bridges SIP VoIP with the GSM/UMTS network.

Finally, there's my mobile phone - a Nokia N95. The N95 has WiFi networking capabilities, and comes with a native SIP stack built-in.  When I'm at home, my mobile is registered over WiFi as a standard extension to my SIP network.  If I'm not at home but if there might be a WiFi network I can log on to, I can place and receive calls over my VoIP server. The N95 is my favourite phone so far. I used to be a very firm Siemens follower starting with the Siemens S25, but having used the N95 for close to a year I really have come to love this phone.

This equipment configuration lends itself to a number of interesting scenarios:

• On an incoming call, all registered extensions ring allowing me to answer the phone on any device.
• I don't need a cordless phone at home - my mobile phone is already my cordless phone for home.
• I can place calls over my home telephone line even when I'm not at home
• Calls to my home numbers can be answered from anywhere my mobile phone is logged on to a WiFi network.
• Place and receive calls over a second SIM, and not have to worry with the hassle of constantly changing SIMs.  The reason for the second SIM here is due to a mobile communications company here in Switzerland called Lebara who provide very competitive international call rates whereas Orange provides a good deal for local calls. 

There's a lot of potential here, limited only by your imagination in how you hook everything up. 

After my last two posts on the Sinhala iGoogle keyboard gadget and searching for Sinhala Unicode, I had a few questions on what Sinhala Unicode would look like, seeing that one needs to have a Sinhala Unicode font installed for it to render properly.

Each operating system seems to need a different number of steps to enable proper rendering.

• Windows XP: you need to install the Sinhala for Internet Explorer 6 patch to get IE working correctly. If you’re using Firefox, you should install the Firefox version supporting complex layout and right-to-left capability, to be able to view Sinhala correctly.
  Screenshot: Firefox on XP (broken)
  Screenshot: IE6.0 in XP (broken)
  Screenshot: IE6.0 in XP with Sinhala Patch (working)
• Windows Vista: this should work out of the box.
  Screenshot: Firefox on Vista (working)
  Screenshot: IE7.0 in Vista (working)
• Linux: follow these instructions to enable correct rendering in Firefox. Konqueror seems to get slightly confused, rendering some of the text correctly, but having problems with certain fonts.

Here’s the way my name should look:

And here’s my name, as rendered incorrectly in most configurations:

Both LKLUG and Akshar Unicode have problems rendering the text, even in configurations where other fonts are able to do so fine.

Akshar Unicode

This font looks the most broken

DinaminaUniWeb

This has a rustic, old-fashioned feel to it.

KandyUnicode

This font might have been alright had it not been that heavy.

KaputaUnicode

Kaputa is a very clean, clear font without any unnecessary embelishments.

LKLUG

LKLUG is slightly broken, and has issues rendering some combinations. It also has a slightly old-fashioned feel to it.

Malithi Web

Clean, and easy to read.

Potha

Potha is a very nice font, getting the strokes just right, looking elegant, modern and uncluttered.

Iskoola Potha

So it comes as no surprise that Potha seems to have been cleaned up and included in Windows Vista by default, named Iskoola Potha. This font has the honour of being the best-looking Sinhalese Unicode font.

Sarasavi Unicode

Sarasavi came in as the second best Sinhalese font. The strokes on this font were a bit too heavy, making it more difficult to read, with some of the strokes being exaggerated.

I’m in Brussels at the moment, attending the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (aka CITCON). CITCON is as always being organized as an OpenSpace. You’re probably thinking “What is an OpenSpace”. Well, according to this description on the CITCON site:

OpenSpace is a small set of rules that allow groups of people to interact in a simple, productive, organized way to create valuable dialogs that address the participants’ most important issues.

The self-organizing nature of the conference and schedule are quite interesting. Yesterday was involved in everyone introducing themselves, ideas being proposed for the talk, and the gnomes doing their magic and the schedule magically appearing. The talks/discussions start today (Saturday) in 5 minutes. I’ll post back with my take after the conference.

The popularity of social networks can’t be denied, but it was still a surprise to find that the BBC had started adding social-bookmark links at the bottom of their news items. Specifically, they’ve added links to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon. Although the BBC does experiment a lot with new media, this was still quite unexpected. Looks like they aren’t the dinosaur they used to be! And it seems it’s not just the BBC readers/viewers who are exposed to Facebook - it seems that BBC staff and employees are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, with the network having gone viral inside the beeb. Was that the reason these links were added?

I’m wondering what the reaction of people who haven’t yet been part of these networks will think once they see these icons. Will they be tantalising enough for them to go subscribe and start using a social network? Or will they simply be ignored? Would be nice to have access to some kind of stats on it.

I have a machine which is running an up-to-date Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation on which I wanted to run Squid. Installing it was a snap - just run sudo apt-get install squid3, and you’re set … or are you? Trying to use the proxy I get an unexpected "Connection refused" message. Investigating a bit further, I see that there’s nothing listening on port 3128 (the default Squid port), nor is Squid runninng. Strange! /var/log/messages reveals a string of messages of the following form:

squid[18518]: Squid Parent: child process 18536 started
squid[18518]: Squid Parent: child process 18536 exited due to signal 6

After a few tries, Squid just dies. /var/log/squid/cache.log contains only
Creating Swap Directories
/var/spool/squid3 exists
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/00
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/01
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/02
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/03
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/04
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/05
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/06
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/07
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/08
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/09
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0A
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0B
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0C
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0D
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0E
Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0F

Squid had no problems starting and doing some initial housekeeping before stumbling. Running squid3 -d 10 produced a ton of debug output, but also this telling error message:

FATAL: Cannot open '/var/log/squid3/access.log' for writing.
        The parent directory must be writeable by the
        user 'proxy', which is the cache_effective_user
        set in squid.conf.

Ah ha! The default Ubuntu-packaged Squid (3.0.PRE5-5 with MD5sum d11df3af2e309f5b989a520e3cd50d55) is configured to run as the user ‘proxy’, but the associated log-directories are not writable by the user ‘proxy’. That’s easy enough to solve.

cd /var/log/squid3
sudo chown proxy cache.log .
sudo /etc/init.d/squid3 start


This time Squid was able to start successfully. Another few seconds were needed to configure the proper ACLs, but after that and a Squid restart later, we’re good to go!

And here is a gadget introduced today by Google to enable easy entry of Sinhalese text, without having to switch your keyboard layout or install special software: The Sinhala On-Screen Keyboard iGoogle Gadget!

The text in the previous post was actually created within seconds, through the use of this gadget.

Unfortunately, both Firefox and Internet Explorer have issues with rendering Sinhalese Unicode text correctly. Again, you can follow the instructions from here to get Firefox to render Sinhalese Unicode properly. This Sinhala Wikipedia entry also has useful information on how to configure Internet Explorer to correctly display Sinhalese text.

The important question is, how long will it take for Sinhalese websites to switch to using Unicode, instead of using proprietary and non-standard fonts like Kandy, Padma or Kaputadotcom?

Go forth and start blogging - in Sinhalese!

Here’s a test to see what happens when you search for රොෂාන් (Roshan) and සෙම්බකුට්ටිආරච්චි (Sembacuttiaratchy) via Google Sri Lanka. Actually, that last search should eventually be a GoogleWhack. If you use Firefox, the pages might not render correctly. Make sure you have a font like Kaputa Unicode installed. If you use any flavour of Linux, you’ll have to follow the instructions from here to enable proper support and rendering.