muh.

Skype finally made it possible to get push notifications for incoming messages and incoming calls on the iOS platform

Also, and not less important, one can switch to other applications while a call is in progress and continue talking. Oh man, I was missing this feature … that means, I can finally really use skype on the iPhone.

One downer though is, that a iPhone 3GS is required

Also, apparently Skype is no longer planning on charging additional fees for calls over 3g / umts. I’m not sure this plan included charging for calls over Edge – which is (barely) useable.

Quote from http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/07/iphone_multitasking_3g.html

In light of that, we no longer have plans to charge a supplement to make calls over 3G. We’re delighted to make it easier for you to talk for even longer and do even more together using Skype.

The exciting question now is, can we use skype on the go .. ?

Well, in Telekom.de Mobile network, the quick answer is: “No”
If your provider does not slow down VOIP Packets, you’re well off …
A friend of mine is using another provider (and another phone, but it has nothing to do with the phone itself) and is well able to use skype over 3g (umts) and even over edge.

If your network provider is slowing down VOIP packets, you’ll have to tunnel your internet traffic through a VPN to a point, where it does not get slowed down.
The following configuration _would_ work:
iphone — 3g internet connection — pptp-vpn-server on a dsl connection — internet

The data between the iphone and a “free” internet connection gets encrypted and tunneled – the network provider inbetween does not know, what kind of data is being sent. That’d be fine, if VPN was working stable on the iphone. But it does not work stable. VPN Connections drain the battery rather quickly (a major point – so one can’t stay reachable for many hours on the go) and second, iOS4 (at least on iphone) does not support automatic reconnect for vpn connections as far as I know.

The reason the latter is very problematic is simple:
If you drive around a little, you’ll probably loose 3g/umts connection once in a while and default back to gprs or edge. When this happens, open connections like VPNs break. It’s possible to prevent this, though quite complicated [It's possible to prevent this from the provider's side]. I assume, the same happens when you switch to another 3g/umts cell, but I’m not sure about this.

So, VPN is not working reliably.
I assume, it’s possible to set up a small script to automagically reestablish broken vpn connections on a jailbroken device. But, for one, I do not like to jailbreak mine, and second, afaik, I cannot jailbreak mine (wrong model number …).

Well, too bad. Thumbs up for skype – thumbs down for telekom. They’re going to loose me as a customer in the next contract cycle in around a year.

Supplemental: I called the tcom support to make sure I understand it correctly. According to the support, it’s possible to book a VoIP-plan – which costs ~35€ per month extra. Otherwise, they do not allow VoIP in their network. I still don’t understand why they want to get rid of me as a customer – and I guess a lot of others too – but .. well – so be it. For the moment, skype is no option for me on the go. For one, I think it’s “forbidden” by telecom if you do not book a VoIP-plan – second, the plan is just too expensive.

The really annoying thing is, I would never ever have actually used the telefone line to call and receive calls from the peers I am using to talk to via skype. These are oversea contacts – it’s just plain too expensive.

More information on the topic in german:

• [german] http://www.tomshardware.de/Skype-Telekom-VoIP-Miller-iPhone,news-242691.html
• [german] http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen-maerkte/iphone-telekom-droht-skype-nutzern-431895/

I’m working for a client who is using wordpress with podpress plugin to create podcast feeds.
That works great, the plugin creates a valid feed and works as expected when used directly in a podcast client (rythmbox was the one I tested it with).
However, the itunes feed was not updated for two days. I pinged the iTunes service – it took another day to list the new episode. That’s far to long for a timecritical publication like in the case of my client.
I’m not happy about this at all!

Edit: (12th July)
Facebook shows similar issues that resolved itself after a while.
( http-caching came up as a possible issue – though feeds should not _have_ a cache set and imho, if so, should be ignored … )

I’m having problems with my wireless network with a laFonera AP. The AP is using WPA1/2 combo mode

Every minute or so, the connection is completly dead for a around 20 seconds. That’s obviously driving me mad ..

By sheer chance, I restricted the rate from 54mbit to 11mbit – which solved the problem. However, I’m still not sure why this happened.

I was wanting to do more Flash/Flex development, but something always held me back … for one, I don’t like underlying programming language, ActionScript (3.0) very much, and for another, it’s very restrictive.
Being restrictive and well-sandboxed is a good thing, especially in a browser plugin (well, Adobe has had it’s shares of security nightmares… even Firefox reminded people to update their Flash installation at some point, a couple of months ago, remember?).

Moonlight seems like a real alternative. It’s an open source re-implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Waiiiiiiit. Microsoft? Yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of their work, however, Moonlight seems like the better of two evils.
For one, you can develop with Mono, and the code should run fairly nicely in Silverlight and Moonlight. Second, although it’s based on Silverlight, it’s a reimplementation. The source is actually available and under a open source license (LGPL 2 according to wikipedia). A couple of days back, I read Microsoft stating, that they won’t sue Linux users using Mono (or was it Moonlight in particular?). That doesn’t mean too much and I haven’t yet read up on this topic enough to understand the implications … as far as I get it, several key technologies in Silverlight are patent protected by Microsoft. And, as a _user_ of software that uses patent protected mechanisms, you can be sued. Sounds like someone who wrote these laws got too much sun. However, MS’s statement, given that they don’t follow some evil hidden agenda, might actually be a good thing.

So, I’m hoping for continued progress on Moonlight and Silverlight, and to have some time to really get to know this new toy.

Btw, If you’re interested in using Moonlight, I suggest you download a diskimage for virtualbox or vmware from go-mono.com/mono-downloads. This way, you don’t need to replace (perhaps used) libraries with cutting edge dev libraries that might harm your sys or drive your packet manager mad.

• Moonlight: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
• Silverlight: http://silverlight.net/

Read more about the patent problematic on the wikipedia article on Mono
There’s a dedicated article on Moonlight on wikipedia too.

A ceasefire … Ubuntu seems now, in 1 out of 2 attempts able to connect to the iphone.

There’s two possibilities as far as I can tell for it to fail (both times initiating the connection via gnome network manager applet):
1.) A “hard failure”: The bluez-daemon doesn’t respond. Restarting bluetooth (turning it off and on via the bluetooth applet) usually helps. Also helps, turning off the iphone bluetooth. I suspect, that the bluetooth daemon tries to do something and gets stuck … and cannot stop, until the other side turns off its radio (bluetooth). Just speculation, but for me, that helps. You can either watch /var/log/syslog (with tail -f for example) or suspect this failure, if the connection was rejected very fast
2.) A “soft failure”: The bluetooth connection is established and the bnep device is up and running, but no address was yet issued by the dhcpd on the iphone. dhclient is used for configuration, and networkmanager (possibly fed with configuration from the gnome networkmanager applet, but this is, again, just speculation) sets a timeout of 1 minute. That doesn’t seem to be long enough. The iphone goes into tethering mode (turns the bar blue) but no address is issued (or received). So, after the timeout, the bnep connection is disposed and you can try again … I couldn’t find a workaround or solution for this problem. I just try again and again if this happens. That usually helps.

Hope this is of some help to you.
I was hoping that the iphone would, at some point, be able to act as an accesspoint rather than relying on bluetooth, but I doubt that’ll happen any time soon. If I have too much time on my hands, I’ll try to understand the timeout problem better.

Lovelytv posted an interesting comment, take a look on his/her blog. I’ll try it asap:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/iphone-tethering-on-ubuntu-9-10-karmic.html

I’m trying to use tethering on the iphone via bluetooth on Ubuntu 9.10, but it’s not working out too well.
Using the network-manager-gnome-applet, it sometimes work, sometimes it doesn’t. Output in /var/log/syslog indicates, that it networkmanager doesn’t wait long enough to receive an address on the bnep0 via dhcp (ip over bluetooth network device) from the iphone – sometimes. Sometimes, it’s the response comes in fast enough and the connection is ready for use.
The odd and annoying thing is, settings to the dhclient configuration don’t seem to have any affect. I was trying to let it wait longer, but the one minute limit doesn’t seem to be affected by it. Rather, the network manager kills the dhclient instead of the dhclient giving up on its own.
The other problem I’m having is, that somehow, the bluetooth device/connection or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t seem to get unregistered correctly and the next time I try to connect, the bluetoothd (called from networkmanager) doesn’t respond (in time?).

Have to debug this … I wasn’t a big fan of networkmanager, or rather the networkmanager-gnome-applet in the past. Now, I’m positively annoyed by it. It uses gconf xml structures to save it’s settings. Which is hard to edit at any rate (IP addresses saved as 32bit integers… but not in hex or binary, no, as decimals… who does something like that?) and it’s utterly lacking some settings that I would expect from it. Also, I couldn’t change any properties on the iphone-tethering-connection. Man, that sucks! Have no time right now, but I have to take a look into the codebase… may be time for me to send a patch … what is open source without participation anyways?

Edit: Ok, there is a nice editor for gconf But that didn’t help at this point

Edit: Read also my second post on this issue

Skype isn’t allowed in t-mobile net. I was hoping that it would work if I routed all data via a vpn, through my home internet connection. Well, no luck, but that opens an interesting possibility: if it’s not a firewall filtering, a modified version of skyoe should work.

In my last post I wrote about JBoss connection pooling issues with SQL Server 2005 when switching between single and multiuser mode.
I also ran into problems when the db was restarted. The scenario is the same, JBoss 5 with Hibernate backed by a jboss datasource (pooled) to a SQL Server.
After the db was restarted, connections weren’t reclaimed and caused subsequent errors.
Validating the connection before using it helped, I added these properties to the datasource:

We’ve been having problems when SQL Server 2005 goes into single user mode (due to maintenance, backups etc.). We use a JBoss datasource in spring and JTA, however, services couldn’t be restored after sql server goes back into multiuser mode.

Solution is simple, just set a timeout (in the datasource.xml file) on the connection and they’ll get restored after the timeout is over:

See my next posts about problems I ran into when the database restarts.

It’s a pain! Give this a try yourself, search for “ooxml apache poi” on the net. You’ll find trillions of websites claiming that Apache POI has support for ooxml and how great that is, or that it’s coming up.

However, that’s not completly true … Apache Poi has support for xslx, that’s the Excel 2007 xml-format, but it’s still lacking high-level access for Word 2007 and the other Office 2007 formats.

The only thing I was after was extracting the text … and that’s easy

Using the POITextExtractor however is trivial … and seems to work fine for doc (Word till including 2003), docx (ooxml-Word2007), xls (Excel till including 2003), xlsx (ooxml-Excel2007), ppt (PowerPoint till including 2003), pptx (ooxml-PowerPoint 2007)