Solipsism Gradient

Free World Dialup is announcing free worldwide VoIP (Voice over IP) phone service. Any FWD member with broadband Internet can call any other member for free, anywhere in the world. This works with some “software phones” and VoIP gateways like the Cisco ATA-186.

In practice, FWD is working as a registrar to index and map VoIP users; they have nothing to do with the infrastructure. This is, of course, the way new communication services should be implemented.

There are a few catches. The calls work only between FWD members; there’s no official bridging to the “plain old telephone system”… (but see below). You must buy an approved SIP User Agent – either hardware or software. Depending on your provider and connection, audio quality may not be all that great, or there may be audible interruptions.

Recently the ITU defined +87810 as the country code for VoIP calls. Another standard, ENUM is being used to map between VoIP phone numbers and IP addresses. This means that, once established phone companies decide to bridge their old systems – meaning, soon-to-be obsolete systems – over to VoIP, this will be the country prefix to use; all Internet users are in the same cybercountry, of course. So far, only some Austrian residents can dial +87810 to call a FWD from their old phone. It remains to be seen what “long distance” charges will be applied in such a case; to keep charges low, every city should have a local bridge.

Thanks to boing boing for the link.

Mark Pilgrim introduces 100 stories:

They are all original. They are all interrelated. Some of them are over 80 years old.

They are 100 stories of unfamous people.

Only a few of the stories are available at this writing. Fascinating stuff.

Dave Pollard writes about the loneliness of the new blogger:

So what can the new blogger do to salvage his (or her) self-esteem when, like the guy that sets up a snazzy new office, sends out flyers and then sits by the phone wondering why no one is calling, his brilliant new blog flounders at the bottom of the page-reads list, unloved and, worse, unread?…

He goes on to give excellent advice… thanks to Radio Free Blogistan for the link.

The Hairy Eyeball pointed me at Lingua Blogs, a list of blogs interested in/about language – a long-time interest of mine – and one of those is the Enigmatic Mermaid. Good stuff…

…and Enig was the one that linked to Japanese Smileys some days ago, and I lost the link. Sorry about that.

Can’t recall what links I followed to get there, but I ran into The Hairy Eyeball. Mostly in English, some stuff in Portuguese – the author lives in São Paulo. Great design, great content, lots of content… only the RSS feed wasn’t working, and I sent e-mail. (It works now )

And he liked my disclaimer! Thanks, Colin!

Sébastien Paquet‘s weblog reminded me to look at Topic Exchange, which I’d been meaning to do for a couple of weeks. Basically, it’s a central database for trackbacks about a given topic… very interesting. I’ll be using it to debug my trackback implementation.

Slowly, I’m getting rid of several bugs in my phpBB code, and implementing new features.

Subscribing to a topic’s feed was crashing if the feed contained a poll; this has been fixed.

I’m implementing threading and trackback now. In preparation for this, the per-message “reply” button now copies the subject line – just like the “quote” button, but no quote is generated. In the next version, “quote” and “reply” will tie the whole thread together.

In contrast, the former top-level “reply” button now says “New Post” and will open up a new thread inside the current topic.

I’ve been getting some comments from people used to standard phpBB forums, mostly complaining about not being able to open new topics.

My intention is to slowly evolve phpBB towards a MovableType-like model. Since I’m the principal poster on this weblog and the forums, and other people post occasional comments and suggestions, this seems very convenient; I’m not interested in running a completely open forum with hundreds of topics.

So, I see my Forum Index as similar to a weblog’s categories, and the topics themselves as sub-categories. And the way I’ll do threads and trackbacks will make them similar to in-line comments on MovableType weblogs.

Found and fixed several bugs in the RSS code.

You can now subscribe to topics containing polls, and the RSS items have been cleared of superfluous <span>s and references to styles – simple old-style HTML tags are now used.

Also, the per-message “reply” button now works the same as the “quote” button, except that no quote is generated. In other words, it repeats the “Subject” line. In the near future, it will also keep a special thread index to keep all posts on the same thread together.

The former top-level “reply” button now says “new post”. It will open a new thread inside the topic.

In the works: threads and trackbacks.