A couple of years ago I bought my first Mac, it was an iBook G3 and at first I was totally in love with the Mac. After the iBook G3, I bought myself a G4 Titanium Powerbook for more performance and it was good. However the last year I started hating Mac OS X more and more.

On my normal workstation (intel based linux machine) I use PWM  as an window manager. Great to use, very minimal and very fast. And it has the one thing that I really require in a windowmanager, and that is sloppy focus. That brings me to point #1 why Mac OS X sucks - No Sloppy Focus

Another point that is very annoying in Mac OS X (according to myself ofcourse), is the fact that the title bars and menu bars are using quite large fonts. I like them small so I can cram more on my display (which is needed with the relative low resolutions that the iBook and Powerbook have).

Another thing I miss in Mac OS X is that there is no default package management system, ofcourse you could install fink or darwinports, but still it stinks.

A little related to the above point is the fact that there is no default development tools installed, you have to download this enormous package yourself. No way to download individual tools, no you got to get them alltoghetter. Which is a pain in the ass if your normal OS is Debian.

Also there is no 'advanced' mode tot configure things in the GUI, these have to be done in the old fashioned text style way. The problem with this is that these changes are going to clash with changes made GUI wise.

Why Mac OS X Sucks in 5 points

1. No Sloppy Focus
2. System fonts way to large
3. No Default Package Management
4. Development Tools not included by default
5. GUI tools do not understand manual changes.
   

Some sites are stating that the Hoodman H-REBEL is a flip up cap for the EOS 350D, but it will not fit correctly, it is a flip-up cap ONLY for the EOS 300D.

Sites that are stating this wrong are:

• Flip-up LCD Cap for Canon 350D - Camera Accessories - Crown Digital
• Hoodman Flipup LCD Cap for Canon Rebel XT

It seems the correct Hoodman Flipup Cap is the H-RXT, but that's nowhere to be found on their site.

So due to this mis-information I currently have an Hoodman H-REBEL Flipup Cap for sale for EUR 15 (instead of EUR 30)

As I noticed that quite some people are struggling to upgrade their 7960 from SCCP to SIP 7.5 here is a little guide on what to do:

You require the following files: P0S30203.bin, P0S3-06-3-00.bin, P0S3-06-3-00.sbn, P0S3-07-5-00.bin, P0S3-07-5-00.loads, P0S3-07-5-00.sb2, P003-07-5-00.bin, P003-07-5-00.sbn. Also you require a DHCP and TFTP server that have been setup correctly (as in DHCP passes next-server/tftp server option to your phone). The files above should all be present on the TFTP server. The file OS79XX.TXT is a 1-line textfile that should contain a single string that is specified in the steps. The same holds for SIPDefault.cnf which is the global configuration for the phone, but for this process the only line relevant is image_version (which can be standalone in the file). Here are the steps to upgrade:

Note that Step 1 and Step 2 can be combined! It will first upgrade to P0S30203, reboot and then upgrade to 6.3. I also got some information that you can start directly with Step 2 if your phone already runs the 5.0 (3.0) SCCP image.

Step 1: Upgrade the phone to version 2(3). OS79XX.TXT has to contain: P0S30203 . It is not relevant what image_version in SIPDefault.cnf says as it is not used in these old versions.

Step 2: Upgrade the phone to version 6.3. Edit SIPDefault.cnf to let image_version say 'image_version: P0S3-06-3-00', OS79XX.TXT should contain 'P003-06-3-00'. This step is required because you can not upgrade from 2(3) to 7(5) as there is another boot loader in play.

Step 3: Upgrade the phone to version 7.5. Edit SIPDefault.cnf and OS79XX.TXT to contain there counterparts of the 6.3 as you did in Step 2

The phone should now be running 7.5 and happy calling!

For our new VoiP setup at the office we have planned the following:

 [ServerA]<->[ServerB]<->[ServerC]

All interconnects will be done using IAX2, ServerB will have an Digium Wildcard T110P to connect to our Essent PRI. ServerA and ServerC will have SIP phones attached. The problem we stumbled in are the following:

• If ServerA wishes to make a call to ServerB/PRI, then ServerB wants to see it authenticated as ServerC.
• If ServerC wishes to make a call to ServerB/PRI, then ServerB accepts the call and puts it trough.

It looks like this is a buggy behaviour in Asterisk and has to do with the order of which users are added in iax.conf on ServerB, for example:

[ServerA]
type=friend

[ServerC]
type=friend

This backfires, as it always will take this last friend entry. If we rotate them it will work correctly. The quick fix I employed has to be made at ServerA or ServerC and not ServerB (confused? I am :)):

[ServerB]
type=friend

[ServerB-out]
type=friend

Incoming calls on ServerC from ServerB come in trough ServerB while outgoing calls go out through ServerB-out (which has the same username and password as ServerB) and does not confuse ServerB. It looks very confusing and strange, and I am very confused about this behaviour. If someone can explain to me why this behaviour fixes this problem please do so :)

N.B.: All asterisk IAX friends/peers/users have notransfer=yes to make sure they always go through asterisk and won't find their own ways to reach another server.