Tech
February 11th, 2011 | Lync, Tech, Windows | Max Sanna
During our Lync 2010 deployment we had some problems with AIM connectivity, with the following symptoms:
- Presence would take up to 30 mins to update on both clients
- Messages in both directions would get lost 90% of the times, with some random ones getting through
- Lots of 481 “Call Leg/Transaction does not exists” errors coming up in the SIP Stack log on the edge server
I had to work this out with Microsoft, and as it turns out it’d have been a very difficult one to debug. The bottom line is that when the provider of your public Lync Edge UC Certificate uses different SSL Cyper Suites from the ones AOL expects, it will try them all until it will eventually timeout and return errors, which happens most of the times.
The following solution will change the order of the Cyper suites and magically AIM will start working fine.
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February 10th, 2011 | Android, Fun, Geekery, Tech | Tim Heyes
In a bit of down time “Action Man” (Adam Maloney), one of our lead developers, has knocked up a native Android application for calculating your bikes gear inch:
“Gear inches is a system that assigns numerical measurements to bicycle gear ratios, to indicate how low or high a gear is.
This app will help you calculate your bikes gear inch by simply entering wheel, chainring and cog sizes.”
A useful tool for us Android carrying, fixed gear riding techies!
Grab it for free here, here or here
February 1st, 2011 | SIP, Tech, Windows | Max Sanna
This guide is the product of a discussion we had on the Technet forums, which addresses the need of some users to deploy Lync 2010 while keeping their legacy 3CX system working for current desk phones.
It wouldn’t have been possible for me to get to this result without the brilliant help of Drago Totev, who provided the initial idea of using Freeswitch and a useful guide which helped me set up the basic system with Lync 2010. This guide re-uses portions of his tutorial with permission.
By the end of the tutorial you should be able to receive incoming calls and make both Lync and 3CX ring at the same time, and perform outbound calls as well from both systems.
I’ll try to keep this guide updated over time, if I get any useful suggestions from the community, anyways, here’s the download. Enjoy it!
Download: Integrating Microsoft Lync 2010 and 3CX Phonesystem using Freeswitch
This is our goal
Tags: 3cx, freeswitch, integration, lync, sip, skype
January 13th, 2011 | Air, Flex, Geekery, Tech | Matt Bryson
We had a challenging situation on our hands this week.
We are building an AIR application for a client, that has an HTML control in one of the windows and this HTML control loads up an HTML page with an embedded SWF, both locally hosted within the application domain.
In the prototype for the app, all worked fine. However, once we started to build the final application, the external SWFsuddenly failed to load!
The HTML page loaded up fine, and we could execute javascript from it but the SWF would not load at all. For some reason the HTML wrapper was simply refusing to load it.
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January 6th, 2011 | Android, Geekery, Tech | Tim Heyes
We recently upgraded our Exchange server from 2003 to 2010 SP1 which has given us some great new features, including the far better web mail which actually works properly on non-IE browsers.
However, for the majority of the Android users in the organisation the change meant that the default email application stopped being able to connect and returned an “Unable to open connection to server” error.
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December 8th, 2010 | iPhone, Linux, Tech | Max Sanna
If you already use Zabbix, you probably love the way it handles management, monitoring and charting like no other solution out there. Since I started using it I got rid of so many old tools, such as Nagios, Cacti, Munin, etc. and I do everything from my Zabbix interface.
A cool thing you can do to get important notifications the “2010 way”, though, is to get rid of expensive SMS services and use your iPhone to get nifty push notifications sent to it in case of problems. And here’s how to do it.
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Tags: Alert, continuity, datacenter, iPhone, monitoring, notifications, prowl, push, server, zabbix
December 6th, 2010 | Mac, Windows | Max Sanna
If you have a Mac and your company is running Microsoft Exchange 2010 with Unified Access Gateway to publish Outlook Web App on the internet, chances are you’ve been bashing your head when trying to access it remotely from your Mac, with Safari hanging during the connection.
This is becoming an increasingly common setup, given the fact that UAG provides a convenient way to securely publish Exchange services on the Internet, and can check client computers for compliance with company policies upon connection (anti virus, firewall, etc.), but this compliance check seems to go wrong on Snow Leopard and Safari.
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Tags: exchange, java, jvm, outlook web app, owa, safari, uag
December 3rd, 2010 | Company, Releases, Tech | Tim Heyes
Last week we finally managed to release a new version of our web site over at skinkers.com. It seems to be the internal projects that take the longest with client work always taking precedence, but with a final sprint to the line we succeeded in getting it live.
For a while now we’ve had the slightly tired splash page directing visitors to either our enterprise software site, or this blog.
We had to make sure we got the new site right though making sure it clearly illustrated, and demonstrated to some extent, what we do.
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November 22nd, 2010 | Company, Data, Geekery, Tech | Matt Bryson
Back in July when the boris bike scheme started we went out and tried the bikes along with some of the apps that had been released (read the post here). At the same time we had a look into the API’s and plotted the location / availability of the bikes over time. However, we totally forgot to upload our little experiment!
You can now see the result – Boris Bikes on our labs site.
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September 2nd, 2010 | Air, AS3, Flex, Geekery, Tech | Matt Bryson
Update : Thanks to Paul Robertson for pointing out that as of AIR 2.0.2 released a couple of weeks back, there is native cross platform GZIP support in Air. However, if you need to achieve this in the 1.5 runtime for any reason, the below is still applicable!
To reduce bandwidth many servers compress HTTP responses using GZIP encoding. Pretty much all web browsers support GZIP decoding, so the actual data transfered is a fraction of the final unpacked response. Flex/Flash apps running in a web browser can take advantage of this as the browser handles the HTTP responses.
However, Flex AIR apps which do not run in a browser don’t have this luxury. By default, the headers sent in a request from AIR do not accept GZIP encoding, and even if they did, Flex / AIR runtime has no idea how to handle GZIP de-compression!!
Thanks to the Flex community however, it is possible!
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Tags: Air, AS3, Flex, Gzip, HTTPService, URLLoader