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!

This is yesterday’s “Business as Usual” picture:

And here for comparison is a similar group photo of today, where people are a bit more “normal” than yesterday’s picture:

(Note that the dog who was wearing a tie yesterday is also in a far more relaxed state in her T-shirt)

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 London-based HR consulting firm has for five consecutive years ranked Zürich as the city with the highest quality of life. Two other Swiss cities were in the top-ten list, with Geneva and Bern coming in at 2^nd and 9^th place respectively. The analysis is based on 39 criteria including political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport and other public services.

You might already have heard about the Freeze at Grand Central Station in NYC, the Freeze in San Francisco, and many others. Here’s my video of the Zürich Freeze:

The beginning of the video is not that great due to the backlighting.

Since over a year, we've been doing a continual move from the old building to the new.  Following completion of the redecoration and fitting of the first half of the building, I've also been at the new building.  At the end of January, work on the rest of the building was completed and we're now reunited with rest of the people who have now joined us in the new building.  We're all amazed at how well the new building has turned out.  Highlights include the water lounge, game room, egg meeting pods, cable car meeting rooms, and fire poles and slides to take you from one floor to another! My favourite part is definitely the very cosy library, complete with its own (fake) fireplace. There are lots of micro-kitchens scattered throughout the building, and an amazing restaurant where one can have breakfast, lunch or dinner. We had a media-day a few days back, with the beeb doing a nice video on it. Check out the rest of my gallery, or the Zürich office's official Picasa gallery.

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.