Tech Talk- IT & Code

We've had a really busy week in the Junction Networks lab. We've started a testing program for some of the routers out on the market so that we can come up with some solid recommendations for routers that are known to work well with our network. (Alas, not all routers are created equally.) The main rule is that the router needs to not interfere with SIP. Specifically, we need routers that don't rewrite SIP packets, because we do a fair amount of work in learning about the network that a packet comes from in order to route and transfer calls properly.

Douglas Crockford¹ of Yahoo! has just published an excellent new book titled Javascript: The Good Parts.

The other day, I made a mistake while committing some work I'd done via Git to our SVN repository. Since this series of articles is about working with Git and SVN, I wanted to take a short time to look over what happened as well as a small change in my workflow that will prevent it from happening in the future. The mistake was that I accidentally pushed a file I was working on to our main repository. There was no damage caused, as the file wasn't in use by anything in production yet, but I'd rather not have pushed it at all. The solution is to diff my work against the current repository and make sure only the changes I want or going to be pushed. But since Git doesn't work in a centralized fashion, you can't run a straight diff: you first have to know which revision to use as the left hand side. In Subversion, this is straight forward as it's centralized; the left hand side is the SVN repository HEAD, and the right hand side are your uncommitted changes.

The potential of IP telephony is, of course, very cool. But one concern that the industry buzzes about is SPIT - SPam over Internet Telephony. As with every IP service, spam is a real concern, although SPIT hasn't taken over to the same level that e-mail and blog spam have. A SPIT spammer uses a VoIP system to make hundreds of unsolicited, pre-recorded phone calls. This seems like a telemarketer's dream, of course, but it has bigger concerns since it can easily be used for illegal activity, such as tricking the recipient into punching in a credit card number that can then be stored on the computer that placed the call. In my opinion, it is the use of VoIP for illegal activity that is the real concern. Although telemarketing is unpopular, it's a legal practice and VoIP doesn't give telemarketers the ability to do anything they aren't already doing - it just lowers the cost of doing business.