A friend of mine introduced me to SightSpeed the other day, and I must say I'm impressed! My previous experiences with webcam conversations were "less than optimal" to say the least. Poor image quality, lagging, voice out of sync with video, etc.

With Sightspeed I got excellent video quality (comparable to VHS, which is the best I can do with my camera), the voice was crisp and clear, echo reduction built in, easy set up and easy to call. A small thing, but I was impressed with the speed it connects at. When I double-click a contact it almost instantly connects and rings on the other side.

But don't take my word for it, download a copy and give me a call. Use my personal e-mail to add me as a contact. If you don't have my personal e-mail account, send me an e-mail via the link on the right. It comes in two versions, one free and one with a payment plan that gives you conferencing features. It even comes in a Windows and MacOS version.

I have not tested it properly behind several firewalls so I'm not sure how much effort it is to configure it, but browsing through the support page it looks fairly straight forward.

So far, I've only got one negative comment. They offer a Click-To-Call button that you can put on your webpage, letting visitors go to a web page where they can install an ActiveX control and start a video call with you without downloading or installing a program. This seems like a good idea, and it probably is too, but on the web page my e-mail address is displayed in plain text. This is a Bad Thing™. Displaying an e-mail address in plain text enables spammers to harvest it and I really don't need more spam. Too-bad, the Click-To-Call button would have fitted nicely in on the right here... 

I have a GridView with a BoundField containing a DateTime value, but instead of "01.07.2006 00:00:00" I wanted it to display "June, 2007". Easily fixed with a DataFormatString="{0:MMMM, yyyy}", right? Not so... It refused to apply the format string. Luckily, Google came to the resque again, Raj Kaimal had the same problem and solved it.

Turns out that the field value is HTML encoded before the format string is applied. Add a HtmlEncode="False" to the BoundField and the problem is solved. Thanks Raj!

Eric S. Raymond has an interesting article where he claims that 2008 is a hard deadline for an operating system to become the standard for desktop computing. With 64-bit hardware coming out there is an opening for any OS to become dominant on the new hardware platform and Raymond contends that by 2008 the de facto standard will be set and network effects will do the rest.

Steven Den Beste (fantastic surname :) ) has an interesting view on why Linux won't make it as the dominant desktop platform, comparing it to Christianity in the 17th century.

The Opera browser was released for the Wii console a week or two ago and already the adult industry is adapting to the new platfom.

I'll never be able to look at a Wiimote the same way again...

This is another reason not to haul a dead tree into the house...

Christmas Tree Goes Up In Flames - video powered by Metacafe

Cool coca cola ad:

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