One of the advantages of VoIP is the ability to bypass the PSTN alltogether when making a VoIP-VoIP call. Unfortunatly it’s still relatively hard to do that but at least two websitea are aiming to change that. SIP Broker allows people with VoIP servers to register and setup a peering so inbound and outbound VoIP calls can be routed using an assigned provider prefix between users. For example anyone on a VoIP network with access to SIP Broker can call me by getting into the SIP Broker dialout for their service and then using my povider code “*363” followed by my extension “3711”. IAX Broker is a similar service that works using the IAX protocol instead of SIP.

For a long time I’ve been running SquirrelMail to provide webmail for my users. It does some things really well like allowing me to tie it into my Amavis/SpamAssassin spam and virii filtering solution on a per virtual-user basis. On the other hand the usability is not so great which is why I’m excited to see a new crop of AJAX powered webmail solutions on the horizon. For those not familiar AJAX lets you make web apps much more like desktop apps ala Google’s Gmail. Zimbra, communik8r and RoundCube have all come to my attention but none of them is quite ready for prime time yet. I hope that at least one of them stays an active project and allows for SquirrelMail style plugins which are essential to my webmail and need to work in a complex MySQL virtual user and Amavis per-user environment. If anyone else knows of any great webmail packages I haven’t seen please let me know!

*Edit: Based on the number of Google referred hits to this page I’m guessing that a lot of people are looking for a better open source webmail package for their mailserver. If you find one you like please post a link in the comments section and share your knowledge!

It’s always been a challenge to get vertical centering to work using CSS. I recently located a solution which supposedly uses valid CSS for centering in a div or a window. Cool stuff.

This morning I found a few open source software projects I had not seen before and which look interesting. Scribus is an attempt to create an Adobe InDesign or PageMaker like experience. Primarily for Linux, Mac OSX and Win32 ports are in the works. The screenshots look promising I’ll have to take this one for a test drive some day.

Bluefish is billed as an advanced web editor. Looks like a great tool for doing PHP site programming but it’s definatly not a WYSIWYG editor like Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. For that you should probably take a look at Nvu which I’ve written about in the past.

For those fans of the now defunct tech show “The Screen Savers” formally of ZDTV, TechTV, G4TechTV and G4 I have exciting news. Patrick Norton, Robert Heron and Jim Louderback (all of former ZDTV/TechTv fame) have been working on a new project for ZiffDavis called DigitalLifeTV. It’s still getting started and has rough episodes occasionally but production value is consistently increasing and it is a lot like the old TSS format. The show is streamed live on the web and is also availible for download after the fact in a variety of formats. If you’re a former ZDTV/TechTv fan or just someone interested in technology but not looking for something over your head I encourage you to check this out!

Today I happened across the eyeOS project which aims to create a browser based personal content management system. It is PHP based, has partial AJAX support and is GPL. Cool idea, it could be an easy way for web newbies to create and maintain websites.

From the site:

EyeOS is a free, cross-platform Personal Content Manager System based upon the style of a Desktop Operating System. The base package includes the whole Operating System structure and ten apps, as a Calendar, a File Manager, a Text Editor, an Internal Messenger, a Browser and a Calculator.

I’ve been working on my Asterisk server again cleaning up the configuration and peering with various VoIP services so today I signed up for the Gizmo project. Gizmo is a lot like Skype in that it provides an easy way for the VoIP novice to get online, chat with friends and make and receive calls from the phone network. A big reason I like Gizmo much more is that Gizmo is based on the open SIP protocol which means it’s easily interfacable with Asterisk and other VoIP devices. Be sure to check it out.

While I was setting up the Gizmo account I also ran across the FreeConferenceCall site. My guess is the free service gives you a long distance number to call in while the paid service gives you a toll-free number but it’s still a cool idea and a nice way to get a big conference call going, especially with those free nights and weekends on your cell phone plan. They also have a way to dial in via Gizmo (and thus any SIP client) so you can get free access that way too.