I've had Vonage phone service for about two months now. We are keeping the service for good. Here are some things I've learned:

• Do sign up for the service. The voice quality is really good, and it behaves very much like a traditional phone line. I've even used it to send/receive faxes via my computer's internal modem. Besides, it is saving me money over my old carrier's offerings.


• Don't transfer your existing number. I wasted a month+ having two lines only to have Vonage tell me that they are uanble to acquire my landline number from my old carrier. I have since cancelled my landline, and asked my old carrier to put in a forwarding number recording.


• Don't expect high-quality international calls. Our experience with international calling has been on the negative side. We are not sure what the problem is, but quality of the calls have been pretty bad. Sometimes we cannot get through at all for several days. But, that seems to be common with VoIP products in general.


• Do use referrals. Who can say no to a month's worth of free calls?


• Do be patient when you call Vonage. Unlike my old carrier, where the wait to talk to a warm body is but a few minutes, waiting to talk to someone at Vonage can take up to 20+ minutes.


• Do put your adapter behind your firewall. In my case, Vonage sent me a Linksys RT31P2 router+adapter combo unit, which I used as my main router and DHCP server. After putting up with the crappy web admin interface for two months, I had enough. I now put everything, including the RT31P2 unit, behind a Netgear router, which I really like. I was expecting firewall problems, but did not get any. The phone works as it did before, and quality has not suffered.


• Do reboot when in doubt. When I was moving the RT31P2 unit behind a Netgear router, the phone was not working until I rebooted it. Then everything worked. I had to do this once before as well when the Linksys unit was my main router, and I had lost Internet connectivity.


• Do keep your eyes open for similar technologies. I just signed up with Skype the other day along with a friend. The voice quality is incredible. Even the subscription services such asSkypeOut and SkypeIn are quite affordable, in my estimation. Furthermore, a family member is trying to get me to buy a D-Link DVC-1000 so that we can do video conferencing over broadband easier, even for the technology-challenged among us. From what I've seen, the frame rate is pretty good (~25 fps).

VoIP has come a long way. When I was a graduate student, one of my colleagues did his research work on it, as in he rolled his own software so he could communicate with his family in South America on the cheap. It worked, but inconvenient. He and his family members had to gather around a pair of Sun workstations in university labs at appointed times and talk really loud into the headsets, often repeating things and living with long latencies. The noise level also bothered me, as I found myself unable to do my work whenever he ran one of his "test calls", and he ran them often.

In contrast, the abundance of broadband connections and powerful personal computers in homes today, among other factors, are making services provided by Vonage and Skype viable alternatives to the POTS being offered by companies such as AT&T and SBC.

Very cool.

In a recent entry, I had mentioned that I signed up with Vonage. Right now, I am waiting for my current phone number to be transferred over. However, it's been over 4 weeks, and I am still waiting.

Running out of patience, I finally called Vonage, waded through their voice menus, got to a human, and asked for an update. The answer is that my carrier is sitting on their hands, supposedly. Vonage has opened some kind of inquiry into this. Again, I am still waiting.

Looking back, though, I wonder if simply notifying everyone that my phone number has changed to my new Vonage number would've been quicker....

I was in the process of uploading a Beta 7c for Freeciv when I noticed that the 8th beta just came out. But, I am glad it did because an annoying bug with sounds was fixed. My package for it is here. However, it will eventually be moved to a more appropriate location here instead.

Things that have changed are as follows:

• Based on beta 8 source code
• Sound support enabled for both GTK+ 1.x and 2.x clients
• Added readline support to civserver
• Modified Freeciv Server slightly to accommodate behavioral change in civserver due to readline support

Enjoy!

I have finished putting together another release of my package for Freeciv 2.0.0 Beta 7. The primary goal of this release is to include the GTK+ 2.x game client.

However, the new package now weighs in at approximately 12.5 MB, roughly an increase of 250% over the previous package. The extra bloat is mostly due to the inclusion of the GTK+ 2.x game client.

You can either download the entire package, or just the pieces that have changed:

• Freeciv (GTK+2).zip. The GTK+ 2.x game client.
• Freeciv Server.zip. Version 0.2.1 of the civserver wrapper application.
• ReadMe.zip. The modified Read Me file.

If you choose to download only the changed pieces, note that you should place them in wherever you have your installation, replacing pre-existing versions of these files.

One thing that is still missing from my packages is sound support. I'll tackle that in a future package.

Lastly, I am ambivalent about including both game clients in my package due to the dramatically increased size. If you have suggestions on how I can handle this better, please let me know.

Enjoy!

I was sick most of last week (and the week before). On top of that, work was super busy. Between those two things and trying to lead a normal life, I didn't have much time to work on the GTK+ 2.x version of the Freeciv game client.

However, now that my fever has subsided, and work is not so time-consuming, I got a chance to pick up where I left off. The work to come up with a re-distributable package is almost done. I just need to tidy up some loose ends and produce the package.

As a matter of preview, the next release of my package will contain two game clients:

• Freeciv. This is the client everyone who has downloaded my package has been using.


• Freeciv (GTK+2). This is another client that also runs on top of X11. However, it has a richer UI that some might appreciate. Furthermore, it has UI elements that enables you to launch the game server executable civserver as well as manage the game server options, similar to what Freeciv Server is meant to do. Lastly, I am told this is the client of choice going forward for Freeciv.

You can get a feel of what the GTK+ 2.x client might look like by visiting the screenshots page on the freeciv.org site.

Stay tuned....