Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, August 8, 2003

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Note for the interested: there is an H.323 tutorial for ohphoneX (a primitive port of Gnomemeeting to Mac OS X).

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Minolta DiMAGE Z1: "The new DiMAGE Z1 is a rather odd looking ten times optical zoom, three megapixel digital camera. The Z1 looks as though it has dropped out of a science fiction movie with its rounded body and..." [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

Making iChat AV work with Firewalls -- Comment()
There is a help available if you need to make iChat AV work with the built-in firewall of Mac OS X. You have to open ports 5060, 16384-16403. You also may need to open ports 5298 (Rendezvous) and 5297 (sending files with iChat).

I just now realized that iChat AV shows a mirror image (horizontally reflected) on the sending screen, and a normal non-reflected image on the receiving screen. Thus, the camera works like a mirror. This is a bit annoying, when pointing the camera to the screen, for example, because the local image is not as seen.

I have today tested iChat AV with two other Macs, the other was an old desktop G4 (450 MHz) and the other a PowerBook G4. These systems didn't have a camera, but one-way video conferencing worked all right. (We did have some problems in getting the audio level loud enough.)

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IBM's Power5+ to hit 3GHz: "The road ahead for IBM's Power chip line is full of speed boosts with the Power5+ chip hitting 3.0GHz and its successor going well beyond that." [The Register]

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Scripting News writes: "Scoble signs Hillary Clinton. The deal of the century."

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Lessig blog, moved: "So after the FUD about the FEC, EFF's Marc Perkel has volunteered to host lessig.org and my blog. [...] Please update your links, if you want to keep following the thread, to http://lessig.org/blog, and RSS is here." [Lessig Blog]

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EU's power to be tested in Microsoft showdown: "The European Commission said again that it intends to fine Microsoft for damaging competition in the past and would require changes to preserve competition in the future." [Computerworld News]

Resources for videoconferencing -- Comment()

Some of these are not quite up-to-date, but contain useful information regardless.

New book reviews -- Comment()
I have written three new book reviews for the Tietoyhteys magazine. The first book was sent by Springer for review, the two others are by a Finnish publisher. The reviews are written in Finnish: