The Zimbra for Mobile: Funambol

Funambol has an open source approach to Mobile Email and Mobile Sync. Some say that Funambol is out to take out RIM. They have a model similar to what I saw last with SugarCRM - free for Enterprise IT users or personal sync and you can buy the enterprise edition. I think that is a good model and the space needs a competitor as well. The software appears to be licensed under the AGPL, again I have seen that after a while. For those not familiar with AGPL (Affero GPL), it is a stricter form of traditional GPL license in that you cannot even host it w/o disclosing source code.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Wix and Sprout: Online Flash Editors

If the thought of having to learn flash to make the delightful widgets and apps ever occurred to you, then here are two tools for you: Wix and Sprout. I tried Sprout myself and it was extremely easy to use (I am still waiting for a Wix Invite). Sprout's focus seems to be the creation of widgets - small pockets of content with rich media you can put on your blogs or websites to promote anything you want or tell people about yourself (the new jazzed up way against the old boring image of yourself). Wix on the other hand is more focused on building a full website.

Other differences include the fact that Sprout is on the West Coast (and Hawaii) and Wix is in NY and the former is kind of ahead in that it recently got its Series A with Polaris ($5M).

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Replicating MySQL over the WAN

I am researching how practical it is to do real-time replication of a MySQL database over a WAN SSH tunnel. What are the constraints caused by bandwidth, MySQL *blocking* bugs (apparently there are a few out there in older versions of MySQL such as 4.x) and how real-time is the real-time replication. How well does a Master/Slave or a Master/Master MySQL system work in this case?

Getting Asterisk to work behind a firewall

One of the main things you will need to get to work is Asterisk behind a firewall for the LOTS architecture. Asterisk doesn't support STUN and instead relies on pinholes and firewall policies to be tweaked. Here is what you need to do:

1) Set the externip in sip.conf to the firewall's extenal IP address. This address is used by Asterisk in all its signaling messages which are directed outside the firewall. E.g externip=123.123.123.123

2) Set the localnet variable to indicate. This is perhaps the most important thing to do since it indicates to Asterisk what is private - which means it knows what is public from a NAT perspective. If you don't specify this, Asterisk will not apply the externip and will assume every address is private. Things may not work as you expect. E.g localnet=192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0

3) In the firewall, open pinholes which redirect all traffic on the firewall IP address for the rtpstart and rtpend ports defined in rtp.conf to Asterisk.

For more general info, you can look at this link but it may have more than what you are looking for, so stay focused :).

How to use a third party SIP softphone with your Vonage Account

This is real easy. The Vonage server uses SIP in a very standards compliant way and makes use of SIP forking etc which allows multiple phones to register as well.

Here are some pointers to help:

1) The vonage SIP Proxy is basically 216.115.20.41 or sphone.vopr.vonage.net
2) You will need to get a userid and password for your softphone account from Vonage.

That's pretty much it. After that you can register any standards compliant SIP Softphone like SJPhone or a more sophisticated solution like WebAstra to work with your Vonage account!