Don't use the IR blaster on your TiVo. Upgrade to a Series 2 standalone with OS 4.0 and use a serial cable to connect your digital cable box. This gets rid of the slow channel change delays and pop-ups that come up when you change channels.
Despite what some say, you have to have a Series 2 to use serial channel change support. There is a port on Series 1, but it won't work - and you will just be sending IR without a blaster.
If you are on Comcast/AT&T, quite a few of the Motorola boxes support serial with the latest firmware. Check out the TiVo forum on AVS (www.avsforum.com) for more information.
cdrecord is a piece of crippleware crap. I wasted two hours last night trying to get cdrecord-super-elite-pro-dvd to burn a DVD on my G4 only to find out it doesn't support discs bigger then 1 gb. I'd also like to add that the authors web site is worthless, has no faq or howtos and poor documentation.
I would highly recommend staying away from cdrecord and using the GNU replacement dvdrtools. if I wasn't on panther trying to burn some damn ISOs, I'd be using Toast or Disc Copy. hmph.
I work for an RBOC (guess which one) in Fresno and I can tell you we have more redundancy and bandwidth then you would think.. SBCIS has dual POPs in Fresno and Bakersfield, with quad redundant OC192 self-healing SONET rings. Time Warner Telecom/GST and Brooks Fiber/MCI Worldcomm also have SONET rings covering most of the Valley as well that connect back to their own networks. Comcast also has their own HFC networks that they carry video and data on as well.
I've personally managed BGP peering and circuit provisioning with several large financial and government data centers here in Fresno and I can tell you that most large companies here consider redundancy AND performance to be paramount. Like the original poster said, it's all in the $$ though.
Pat (posting on behalf of himself and repping Fresno)
Panther has serious bluetooth issues out of the box. The Bluetooth Setup Helper fails to run, from the menu bar or the new Bluetooth control panel. My Nokia 3650 and Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse both fail to work, using either my D-Link/Apple or Microsoft Bluetooth modules.
You can pair devices by hand, but they do not work under any applications. Also, once you pair a device the Bluetooth control panel goes nuts and corrupts the Window view so you have to close it.
Hopefully they fix this is the next build, I love my new Bluetooth mouse and it worked great in 10.2.6.
Oh yeah? Or you could buy a Treo 180G and try dialing in the dark, with their frequently defective keyboard LCD dialpad. You can also punch on the screen to dial and render it useless after a week.
OR, you can do what I did and buy a Nokia 3650 and try and figure out how the hell to dial phone numberrs and punch SMS's on a round deal. What is it with these people? Can you just put some easy to dial numbers on a keypad AND have some useful applications in one package?
I can't say I like my $500 Nokia 3650 anymore then the damn Treo. I'd settle for a $30 Nokia so I can dial in the car. Damn people, just get it right. For $500 I'd expect a phone I could dial.
To add to that a bit, most carriers transport voice traffic between COs over ATM VCs (virtual circuits), which get switched and meshed onto a SONET network. SONET provides reliability, resiliency and redundacy and channelizes customer voice and data transport. SONET generally runs on single-mode fiber physical media and provides a "ring" that is self healing.
SONET provides the back end transport for ATM/DSL, DSx/T1 DACS (digital access cross connect - T1s just end up as virtual circuits on large ATM links) and Frame Relay as well as voice encapsulated on ATM.
I just got a Nokia 3650 too. Check out MP3Go. It's a kick-butt 128k mp3 player on your phone. It supports the MMC cards so you can fit 128 megs worth of tunes on a card! I've also found out My-Symbian which has a ton of Series 60 OS apps.
The first thing I did when I got mine was uninstall all the bundled demo-ware games and apps. Oh yeah, and make sure you go to Nokia and patch the video recorder so it records audio correctly.
Just fire up NetStumbler and take a drive down Shaw Ave to 99. There are tons of businesses with open WiFi, and a lot of the condo/apt complexes have at least a dozen wide open APs.
Or, hit up the Starbucks all over town if you want to pay $6/sitting for some internet access in Fresno.
I would be inclined to agree with Pii's layer 3 assessment - but with all of the Layer 3 switching and filtering functionality being done at the Core. Keep the intelligence at the core and look at deploying Cisco's LRE solution to the individual units.
I've had very good experience deploying Cisco LRE 2950 switches for campus dorm solutions. You can use Cisco's CPE and related provisioning solutions for access control.
No kidding, I was watching the Dodgers games and they have Matrix billboards all over the place. Oddly enough, I was in San Jose yesterday at the Cisco campus and all the bus's and bus stops had Matrix ads too.
Have you ever ordered a pizza before? This is a fun one you can do in room full of your coworkers. All it takes is a phone number and someone's name - and you can get their address. Even if their phone number is unlisted!
Call up Me and Eds or Pizza Hut and tell them you want to order a pizza for delivery. Give them your phone number and name, and they will happily read you back their address. Then hang up.
For more information on securing your Cisco wireless network, check out the detailed SAFE blueprint for Wireless written by a team of CCIEs at Cisco. Definitely a good read, goes into TKIP, LEAP/EAP and future security standards. It's conceptual as well as techinical so you can give it to your boss as well.
Like most Cisco engineers that use their SoftPhone or attached USB phone, you can always VPN back into your office and then attach to your CallManager.
As a matter of fact, the new version of Cisco VPN Client 4.0 has on-demand VPN so you could fire up your SoftPhone and it would automatically VPN in over your wireless connection and let you make and take calls.
Generally the magic number is 150ms. Once you get over that, you start getting UDP/RTP packet loss and chunky voice.
You also have to take in account how much jitter or variable delay you have on your circuits that are carrying the calls. This is what Quality of Service is made for.
SBC currently has a flat-rate local, flat-rate long distance plan. See National Connections for $20/month. It bolts on to your existing local service with Caller ID/Caller ID Call Waiting, Voicemail, etc.
SBC also has a combo that includes the above features, with unlimited LD ready to go. That is called All Distance Connections and it is $49 a month. This is the commercial that is currently playing in California.
I happen to work for SBC - but as a VoIP/IPT network engineer oddly enough. So take that as a blatant plug.
Rendezvous is a standards-based implementation of multicast DNS. It uses multicast transport of those packets to cover a campus network. Unicast would refer to a single IP address source and destination.
Cisco CallManager does not support SIP. It uses skinny (SCCP) to talk to Cisco IP phones and telephone adapters. It uses megaco (MGCP) to talk to Cisco IOS gateways, and vanilla H.323 for other ones.
Cisco does make SIP products, but they are for use with their SIP Proxy Server product or third-party SIP proxies.
Buy an Oregon Scientific or compatible weather station, wired or wireless for around $200. Then get wx200d (http://wx200d.sourceforge.net) and install it. It has a plotting engine as well as a live client->server engine for using graphical clients to display live data.
I ported the wx200d communication code to BSD a year ago. Good software!
I feel the same way, but with the Worms franchise. I love Worms on PC - and I was pissed off to find out they created a new Worms game, but wait.. it's a puzzle game. WTF is with that?
Don't those idiots realize that 4 player capable GameCube with progressive scan would be the ultimate platform for some serious Worms action? Worms on GC would be a better party game then Super Mario Party - is there anyone here stupid enough to buy that horrible excuse for a game? It takes two and a half years to actually make it around the board, and you spend a year just waiting for the damn mini-games to load. Then they are boring as shit!
Oh don't get me started with lame Mario franchise games - I thought Mario was a plumber, not a janitor! Why the fuck is he running around with a vacuum cleaner sucking up GHOSTS? Are those idiots at Nintendo in Japan on CRACK?
Sorry about I just wanted to blow off some steam.. Carry on.
I bought my optical cables for my DVD to Sony DTS receiver hookup. A 6 foot cable was $7, with shipping new on eBay. That same optical cable at Best Buy (if you bought a Monster) would be $49. No shit.
I was at Wal-Mart the other day and I noticed they carry cheap digital coax and optical cables now. I think made by Belkin, they were only about $8.
If you aren't an "audio-phile" (an idiot who doesn't spend $50 on speaker wire) look around for some good cable prices. Monster cables are a ripoff.
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Don't use the IR blaster on your TiVo. Upgrade to a Series 2 standalone with OS 4.0 and use a serial cable to connect your digital cable box. This gets rid of the slow channel change delays and pop-ups that come up when you change channels.
Despite what some say, you have to have a Series 2 to use serial channel change support. There is a port on Series 1, but it won't work - and you will just be sending IR without a blaster.
If you are on Comcast/AT&T, quite a few of the Motorola boxes support serial with the latest firmware. Check out the TiVo forum on AVS (www.avsforum.com) for more information.
Pat
I would highly recommend staying away from cdrecord and using the GNU replacement dvdrtools. if I wasn't on panther trying to burn some damn ISOs, I'd be using Toast or Disc Copy. hmph.
-pat
I've personally managed BGP peering and circuit provisioning with several large financial and government data centers here in Fresno and I can tell you that most large companies here consider redundancy AND performance to be paramount. Like the original poster said, it's all in the $$ though.
Pat (posting on behalf of himself and repping Fresno)
You can pair devices by hand, but they do not work under any applications. Also, once you pair a device the Bluetooth control panel goes nuts and corrupts the Window view so you have to close it.
Hopefully they fix this is the next build, I love my new Bluetooth mouse and it worked great in 10.2.6.
-Pat
OR, you can do what I did and buy a Nokia 3650 and try and figure out how the hell to dial phone numberrs and punch SMS's on a round deal. What is it with these people? Can you just put some easy to dial numbers on a keypad AND have some useful applications in one package?
I can't say I like my $500 Nokia 3650 anymore then the damn Treo. I'd settle for a $30 Nokia so I can dial in the car. Damn people, just get it right. For $500 I'd expect a phone I could dial.
SONET provides the back end transport for ATM/DSL, DSx/T1 DACS (digital access cross connect - T1s just end up as virtual circuits on large ATM links) and Frame Relay as well as voice encapsulated on ATM.
Hope that helps.
-Pat (an optical SME for a telco)
The first thing I did when I got mine was uninstall all the bundled demo-ware games and apps. Oh yeah, and make sure you go to Nokia and patch the video recorder so it records audio correctly.
-Pat
Or, hit up the Starbucks all over town if you want to pay $6/sitting for some internet access in Fresno.
-Pat
I've had very good experience deploying Cisco LRE 2950 switches for campus dorm solutions. You can use Cisco's CPE and related provisioning solutions for access control.
Ciao.
-Pat
Damn Bungi, I wish this was the first post I read - it would have saved me time from reading all the rest! Good job, keep up the good work! -Pat
Pat
Call up Me and Eds or Pizza Hut and tell them you want to order a pizza for delivery. Give them your phone number and name, and they will happily read you back their address. Then hang up.
-Pat
-Pat
Like most Cisco engineers that use their SoftPhone or attached USB phone, you can always VPN back into your office and then attach to your CallManager.
As a matter of fact, the new version of Cisco VPN Client 4.0 has on-demand VPN so you could fire up your SoftPhone and it would automatically VPN in over your wireless connection and let you make and take calls.
If you haven't seen IPblue's skinny CallManager softphones, check them out! They have an iPaq wireless softphone as well, and their PC version supports USB handsets instead of cheesy headsets.
Cheers.
-Pat
You also have to take in account how much jitter or variable delay you have on your circuits that are carrying the calls. This is what Quality of Service is made for.
-Pat
SBC currently has a flat-rate local, flat-rate long distance plan. See National Connections for $20/month. It bolts on to your existing local service with Caller ID/Caller ID Call Waiting, Voicemail, etc.
SBC also has a combo that includes the above features, with unlimited LD ready to go. That is called All Distance Connections and it is $49 a month. This is the commercial that is currently playing in California.
I happen to work for SBC - but as a VoIP/IPT network engineer oddly enough. So take that as a blatant plug.
Cheers.
-Pat
Rendezvous is a standards-based implementation of multicast DNS. It uses multicast transport of those packets to cover a campus network. Unicast would refer to a single IP address source and destination.
Just wanted to correct you.
Pat
-Pat
Cisco does make SIP products, but they are for use with their SIP Proxy Server product or third-party SIP proxies.
Ciao.
Pat
I ported the wx200d communication code to BSD a year ago. Good software!
Pat
Don't those idiots realize that 4 player capable GameCube with progressive scan would be the ultimate platform for some serious Worms action? Worms on GC would be a better party game then Super Mario Party - is there anyone here stupid enough to buy that horrible excuse for a game? It takes two and a half years to actually make it around the board, and you spend a year just waiting for the damn mini-games to load. Then they are boring as shit!
Oh don't get me started with lame Mario franchise games - I thought Mario was a plumber, not a janitor! Why the fuck is he running around with a vacuum cleaner sucking up GHOSTS? Are those idiots at Nintendo in Japan on CRACK?
Sorry about I just wanted to blow off some steam.. Carry on.
-Pat
-Pat
I was at Wal-Mart the other day and I noticed they carry cheap digital coax and optical cables now. I think made by Belkin, they were only about $8.
If you aren't an "audio-phile" (an idiot who doesn't spend $50 on speaker wire) look around for some good cable prices. Monster cables are a ripoff.
-Pat
Or learn how to tune NFS and use NFS soft mounts....
fp