I Finally got my Google Voice invite this morning, and I must admit it’s pretty cool. Google does a pretty good job of showing off their features at their site, so I won’t go into all of them. The important info for my customers is this. My phone number is changing. Don’t worry, the old numbers aren’t being turned off, I just want to direct my phone calls through google voice so I can use it’s features.
The new phone number is (813) 421-4338.
What features make it Google Voice good for me:
- Better voice mail with transcription
- The service rings multiple phones at once (in case I am not carying one, or am out of the house)
- SIP integration. (VOIP direct integration)
What does that to you the customer:
- As any customer of mine will tell you I answer emails pretty quick (usually in a few seconds during normal hours). This speed of reply now falls over to voicemail as well.
- Less time waiting for call forwarding to kick in when I am not sitting at my desk in front of my business line.
- If you are one of my clients that uses VOIP systems we can now talk direct in a more integrated fashion instead of having to use trunks on both sides to communicate over POTS just because were on different systems.
No sipie (pronounced Sci Pie) is not a new weight loss plan, or a cybernetic pastery. It is however an excelent way to get Sirius XM on your computer. You can of course listen to Sirius XM on line using their web player, but what if you want something less cumbersom, eaiser to use, and without all the “Are you there?” Pop-ups? Well if your on a linux box there is sipie.
From their site: “Pronounced SY PIE, like “sirius python”, sipie is a on line player for Sirius online Internet streaming. It requires a login to Sirius’s streaming, and both guest and subscriber logins are supported. It provides the a back end and a cli and gui.” Basicaly all that means is you install sipie and get a nice usable program that can be run from a script or as a standalone app.
The install is simple:
sudo python uninstall.py BeautifulSoup #if it is installed you will need the easy_uninstall.py script.
wget http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/download/3.x/BeautifulSoup-3.0.7.tar.gz
tar zxvf BeautifulSoup-3.0.7.tar.gz
cd BeautifulSoup-3.0.7
sudo python setup.py install
sudo apt-get install mplayer python-setuptools python-wxgtk2.6
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/sipie/Sipie-0.1196144357.tar.gz?use_mirror=hivelocity
tar -xzvf Sipie-0.1196144357.tar.gz
cd Sipie
sudo easy_install .
That’s it. After that your good to go, and typing sipie at bash prompt will ask your a few questions like user name, password, if your Canadian, and for capatha verification. Once entered the values are stored an you should never have to enter them again. Just run sipie.py and enjoy the music and talk.
Remember you can get a free 7 day trail at www.sirius.com.
So what makes a good piece of software? Where should you do your most UI tuning? How big of a server do you need? How much traffic can your application handle? Well the best answer to all of these lies with the 80/20 rule.
OK so it’s not a technical rule like “controllers should have a plural name”. But it is a good rule of thumb. There are many variations. The first time I herd it was back when I was studying for my CCNA. It was presented to me as “You will use 20% of your knowledge 80% of the time”. It holds true. Most of the time everything is a nice standard flow, and everything is going great. Its that other 20% that really causes a problem.
Let me give some examples. What makes a good piece of software? 80% of the time end users should be using 20% of your software, but the other 20% of the time, users need to be able to function as well. Where should you do your most UI tuning? 80% of your user base should be able to access the same 20% of your functoriality, without having to look for it (think of a dashboard). How big of a server do I need? 80% of the time your server should be operating at 20% capacity, 20% of the time it should be at 80% capacity.
The 80/20 rule is a great rule of thumb for doing a quick analysis of your current status on things. Lets look at the server example. If you take a look at your server stats for the last month, and 99% of the time your sitting at 0.5% capacity, the other 1% you jumped all the way up to 10%. You probably bought/leased/acquired to large a server. Time to do a full analysis to determine how you can better utilize your hardware. At the same time, if 60% of the time your running at 40% capacity, and the other 40% your running at 100% capacity, you have no room to expand. Time to price out some new equipment/optimize your utilization.
In all cases the 80/20 rule is just a measure used to determine that something else needs to be looked at. No one should use it for actual metrics. But it is an easy figure to match in your head.