I have been using RingCentral in pas few days and I must say it is great. You will get a free 1-800 number + PBX and call forwarding. The web interface is great to manage the voice mails and calls.

 

I got my AT&T Tilt a couple months ago and I love it. The fact that AT&T excluded the front camera from the front panel does not really botter me since I usually do not make video conference calls. For those of you who do not want to sign a contract with AT&T, I would recommend the HTC P4550 TYTN II version which is unlcoked but a little pricey. Nowadays, companies would rather to get VoIP for their needs cause it is more cheap and reliable. You can get a Skype Pro for $3.00/month for unlimited(3,000 minutes/month) U.S. and Canada calling and some other features that make the Skype more useful. I signed up for Skype Pro today and I must say it is amazing. There is no contract, no setup fee, no hidden charge and once you pay the $3.00 you are good to go. Skype just introcued a new kind of service that gives you the ability to make International phone call with a number in U.S. Here is how it works. When you sign up for Skype Pro, you can see the Skype to Go feature located under services. You should enter your friend's name and number, let's say Marco in Italy. Skype will assign you a 945 area code number in U.S. that you can use to call directly to Marco from your Cell, landline, VOIP free of charge. Of course you should pay the connection fee from U.S. to Italy but you don't have to worry about the data plan and carrying a laptop everywhere.

I installed Skype on my AT&T Tilt and it works like a charm. If you do encounter some hearing probelm when you receive calls or making phone call, you may fix this probelm by turning off your phone and turn it on. Since AT&T provides 3G Internet data plan, I did not experience any delays. I strongly recommend to get a unlimited data plan if you intend to use Skype. Even though, the bluetooth is not supported when using Skype but I still like Sykpe on my phone. 

Since I published this blog, I have not had a chance to talk about myself at all. I am a Web developer in Austin, Texas and have been here in United States since February 06. Immigration is a simple eleven letters word which is easy to write but hard to understand and get familiar with. Since I came to States, I encountered a lot of cultural differences. Last night, we were out to see the 37th St. lighting with my friends. We had fun and actually took a couple of photo all together. At the end, I figured a new person in our group that I have not met at all. I asked my freind who brought him in the group "You did not introduce him to us!" and she mentioned his name. Aftrer two seconds, I asked again what is your relationship with this person, just for curiosity and she said after a delay, "Freind!". I figured I messed up something really badly! cause all of my friends were staring at me. I told her that I did not mean anything and just wanted to hang out with him for a minute but apparently it sounded inappropriate. In contrary, it is appropriate in Persian culture to ask such a question and actually shows that you do care about the new person.

In case you have a problem to connect your Samsung YP-U2J Mp3 player, you should update Firmware to get it working. The new Firmware may be downloaded from Samsung.com or for your convenience you can download it from here. I got this error after I installed the Windows Media Player 11 several months ago but I could not figure out why my Mp3 Player was not working after a couple of Google searching.

Here is the instruction:

1. Download the YP-U2J Updater
   
2. Remove Mp3 player if you already connected to the USB port
   
3. Run the program (You should see something like: Please connect the device)
4. Hold down the Play button and connect the Mp3 Player to USB port (Hold down the play button while you connect the device, you should see a message (normally after 8 seconds) like: Initializing on YP-U2J Updater program screen)
   
5. After you hear the Windows chime "new device found" or the message "Initializing" on YP-U2J Updater, you can now remove your hand from play button.
6. Check the Format Data Area checkbox (By clicking the yes button, you will lose all of your data in your Mp3 player)
   
7. Click the "yes" button
   
8. Finally, click on the Start button (takes less than a minute). DO NOT REMOVE YOUR DEVICE
   
9. IMPORTANT: After updating the firmware, you MUST disconnect the Mp3 player and turn it on. You will see a 20% message for about 50 seconds and it will be restarted automatically.

Update: Please keep in mind that if you sync your Mp3 player with a computer that has a Windows Media Player 9 or 10, you should do these steps again.

A friend of mine requested an ASP.NET photo gallery and I thought the Personal Web Site Starter Kit could be one of the best case. Installation for the local host is not a big deal but the problem got started when I wanted to run the SQL script(Generic SQL Server Scripts for the Personal Site Starter Kit) on the server. Personal Web Site Starter Kit uses memberships and roles for creating users but you cannot execute the tables and SPs with the mentioned SQL script. There is a great tool called aspnet_regsql under %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 folder that you can get rid of them problem. Scottgu has a great artilcle about this tool's interface and basic explanation of it.

 

UPDATE: Google fixed the issue, it is now working properly.

I used to check my emails with T-mobile MDA which was not a useful device. Yesterday, I saw an advertisement about the new BlackBerry model called BlackBerry 8800 and wanted to get some information about its performance and compatibility but when I wanted to type the word "BlackBerry" in Google toolbar, I found that Google won't suggest the rest of black and suggests nothing. I thought that is my connection issue and quickly double checked with Google suggestion that gave me the same result! I have no idea why Google blocked the rest of the word Black.

 

Internet TV era has begun to shake the world really bad. After Netflix's Watch Now feature that currently streams more than thousand of movies at the time and will support Silverlight in near future for better quality and better performance, now it is time for Joost. Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet with DVD quality, full screen. With Joost you can search your favorite channel programs online and able to chat with other people that watching the same scene. Intresting, huh? Joost is on beta version right now but If you would like to try it out, just leave a comment and I will send you an invitation soon.

 

I was reading New York Times last night and found an article in technology's column about new Internet TV station. Since Youtube has lunched its services, a lot of people urged to immigrate from other Video-podcasting websites to Youtube, but internet era is experiencing a new kind of development and it's self production/broadcasting. Kyte.tv is a new website that responds to this huge demand. With Kyte you can simply broadcast your life to other people in the world and they can join to watch you everywhere with mobile broadcasting. In comparison with Youtube, it has a great live chat feature that people can discuss about particular scene or subject when the clip is playing. If you would like to learn more about their services, click here.

I just created a simple channel to see how it works.

I have been listening to the Pandora since I got in States and I love it. It is brilliant. Unfortunately, the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC made a decision to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. In response to these new and unfair fees, Internet radio listener signed a a petition to urge the Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541 .

 

I hope that you will consider joining us.

Keyvan had an invitation from long time ago to test Windows Home Server but for some reasons he could not try it yet. Today Microsoft announced that Windows Home Server is available for users that would like to cooperate for its test. You can apply for a download link here at Microsoft Connect website.

Keyvan has done a great job in his previous article for MSDN about Windows RSS Platform. In this article, you will find a simple tutorial to find out the RSS infrastructure in IE and Visual Studio profoundly.

 

According to Blog Flux, "Commentful is a service that watches comments on blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is a new comment, Commentful notifies you." it means if you leave a comment on a website and want to track it, you should not have to come back to the site and keep visiting a page. There is a cool extension in Firefox that you can download it from here and it notifies you of updates by becoming green (like a traffic light).

 

You can subscribe for each particular link (post, comment, etc) to get an email when its contents updated. Surprisingly, commentful is supported by Community Server.

 

 

   

 

Here is the trick!

Just add a forward slash after http://www.vonage.com// and see what you did.

 

 

Virtual PC 2007 is a great application for developers who want to have multiple OS in one physical machine. This application gives you a lot of capability to run an OS as a host (like Win XP) and several OS (like Win 2003, Win 2000, Win 98, etc) at the same time. One of the best features that I really enjoyed is that you can drag and drop from your host windows to other OS back and forth. Virtual PC gives the ability to have several IP addresses from a physical machine and a developer easily can test his/her applications on different operation systems in order to debug the application. You can download the VPC 2007(30.4 MB) from Microsoft download center and follow the following instructions to install the VPC on your desire OS.

After easy installation, you will see a wizard that can help you to setup the new OS. In this post, I want to install Win 2003 as a guest (secondary OS).

Click the next button,

 

Check the Create a virtual machine and click Next button,

Insert the name of OS, for example, Win 2003 and click the browse to button to specify the physical location on hard drive. You can create a folder like Win2003 on the C: drive,

 

Click open,

 

VPC automatically show you the recommended memory but you can change it to other sizes, just remember to have enough RAM on your host OS. (256 MB would be enough)

 

Click the A new virtual hard disk to creat a virtual hard disk:

 

Now we have to specify the size of virtual hard disk, VPC chooses 65536MB for Win2003, but you can change it to higher size.

 

A simple confirmation message and you are almost done!

 

 

After configuring the virtual hard disk and memory size you will see the following figure: (I installed two Win 2003 on my system)

 

Choose the Win2003(or the name of your OS that you given in wizard) from the list and hit the Start. Before you hit the Start button, just make sure to insert the Windows 2003 installation CD in DVD drive. If the installation process did not start, click the Action and select Reset (you can use Right Alt + R too) to restart the boot sequence.

 A black screen with some boot information will show up shortly and then you should see the welcome screen after awhile and you are all set.

 

Hope it helps.