i’m not saying anything!
I was going to buy this great new phone. It’s got SIP, Skype, Wifi, and it only costs 150 dollars. Then a good friend emailed me a review from OSnews: Review: FiWin SS28S WiFi VoIP SIP/Skype Phone
I’d give you a few good quotes, but it’s almost too depressing. Just go read the article for yourself.
I’m looking for as many good solutions as there are to do video chat/calls between a Mac and Windows/Linux. Right now I’ve only been able to find two reliable and acceptable solutions and a whole bunch of unanswered questions.
Over the AIM network
Over the Skype network
Over SIP
I found that WengoPhone and X-lite support video chat through SIP signaling and both have Windows/Mac/Linux support, but I don’t know the extent of their interoperability. What other clients can talk with them? Where is the best place to get a SIP account (I have one at gizmoproject.com and ekiga.net already)? I posted in both their forums so hopefully I’ll have an answer soon.
Over Jabber w/Jingle
Last year, Google and the Jabber Foundation released the Jingle spec which extended Jabber to do signaling for arbitrary media types (voice, video, whatever you want). It’s hard to determine which clients fully support the Jingle spec without testing them; the official C++ library is a bit of a moving target and significant efforts to implement it elsewhere are not yet mature. I found Coccinella implemented Jingle video support, but Trillian, who implemented AIM video, did not implement Jingle at all. I also don’t know if iChat uses Jingle when it does iChat-iChat video conferencing or if it uses something proprietary. Even more, I’m not sure if Jingle is simply a client modification or if your Jabber server needs to be ‘Jingle-aware’ for it to work.
Lastly, there’s also the existence of this strange Asterisk-IM plugin from Jive. Somehow, this piece of code connects Jive Wildfire (Jive’s Jabber server) to Asterisk over its management interface (AMI). What I don’t know is whether you would use a SIP client with Jabber support or a Jabber client with SIP support, if it supersedes SIMPLE support in Asterisk, if Asterisk will transport video with SIP signaling or if Wildfire will transport video with Jingle signaling, what clients it works with and what clients can receive audio/video through it. Asterisk-IM confuses the hell out of me.
So if anyone knows the answers to some of the questions I’ve raised, please comment! Thanks.
Installing Trac is a pain in the ass! It took me 6 HOURS to get it running on a shared dreamhost account. I found this guys walkthrough about 5 hours in and it totally saved my life. There were a few mistakes (things have likely changed since he wrote it) but I’m really glad he put it all out there.
Aside from that bullshit install, I’m very impressed with it. Now that I’ve practically learned python, Trac will be an option for any future project I have in need of an SCM. One thing I’d like to see improved is their support for a wider variety of languages to continuously integrate (automated unit testing and all that). All that’s available now is Java and Python 
Seahorse 0.9.x does SSH key management in addition to PGP. This should make my life much easier. I’m very excited. 
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