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Request For Invention: Ultimate Skype Conference Phone
Attention IPEVO: Go ahead and bill me for one of these Skype conference phones as soon as you meet this feature set. Clear voice quality with good range and crosstalk reduction. (Duh.) At least as good as that popular Polycom model everyone uses. Color LCD and interface like the SOLO, but with a few conferencing…
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Back To Business School
I started MBA 590 tonight; the next stepping stone to my next degree, which I should complete at University of Phoenix early next year. Considering I couldn’t even start on the coursework until 9PM, it’s going to be a busy year. 😐
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Skype Phone Reviews: IPEVO SOLO, FREE.2
We‘ve recently started using Skype hardware by little-known vendor IPEVO. SOLO models for the desktop (pictured) and FREE.2 USB handsets for the road. The SOLO plugs straight into your ethernet network, and also functions as a tiny ethernet switch, providing a port for your computer if you only have one RJ-45 jack at your desk.…
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New OpenRain Homepage / IE Woes
We never spent a ton of time on the OpenRain homepage, so we decided to shake it up today in response to user feedback. I wanted to make our proposition clearer while keeping the existing brief one-page style, and add some awesome sauce yet stay business friendly. Check it. As usual, a significant percentage of…
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Photos: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
Here’s Marc on his new OLPC laptop, which he received for a generous donation. It has a surprising amount of functionality packed inside that adorable green exterior, and found all the local WiFi hotspots immediately. Mega philanthropic props to Marc and all involved. Full resolution shots are available on Flickr.
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Welcomed To The RRoD Club
I powered on the ol’ Xbox 360 this weekend to finish Mass Effect, a feat which I was especially pumped about since I’ve been told I’m extremely close. Much to my surprise, Microsoft had left a super special, albeit slightly belated Christmas surprise up in my tubes.Awesome!! Thanks, Redmond!!
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Rails 2.0: Gmail SMTP With ActionMailer
Marc just checked in a nifty little Rails 2.0 plugin to the OpenRain public subversion repository which encapsulates the voodoo required to use a Gmail SMTP server with an otherwise ordinary ActionMailer configuration. Gmail requires TLS security, which is why this is useful. Grab the plugin for your Gmail-mooching Rails 2.0 site, here. Note: I…
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Small Office VoIP: Skype Pros/Cons
Before the 2007 tax year ended, OpenRain decided to finally solidify a telephony strategy for the next year or so. Key requirements were.. Easy ad-hoc and scheduled conferences. Mobile flexibility and continuity across physical locations. Scalability for the next couple years. Voice mail Call forwarding. Little to no management overhead. (I don’t want to run…
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Ruby Troubleshooting: Hpricot On OS X Leopard
If you upgraded to Leopard, you may be getting this nasty error when trying to install Hpricot, which is required by other popular gems such as mechanize.. preston$ sudo gem install mechanize Password: ******** Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org Install required dependency hpricot? [Yn] Select which gem to install for your platform (i686-darwin8.10.3)…
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Rails 2.0: Validations Without Extending ActiveRecord::Base
In more “enterprisey” web stacks (such as Java with Hibernate and Spring MVC), it’s straightforward to design a validatable form whose contents do not correspond directly — if at all — to a persistent OR/M class: such as may happen in an ecommerce site where you’re collecting payment information but can only store some of…
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