Michael Graves

Pink Floyd: The Making Of Money & Directionality

August 21, 2009
Michael Graves
Audio, VoIP

pink-floyd-dark-side-of-the-moon-160 On the surface this might seem a wee bit off topic, but bear with me as I will get there eventually. My thanks for Crunch Gear’s John Biggs for pointing out this You Tube clip documenting the making of the song “Money” by Pink Floyd. I’m a fan of the band and have also followed their individual solo careers in more recent years.

Further, I’m a big fan of Alan Parsons, who engineered a number of the bands recordings. Alan appears in the clip as well. He’s a master recording engineer which is something that I especially admire, having spent a portion of my youth in such endeavors myself.

Skype’s Jonathan Christensen On The SILK Codec

August 19, 2009
Michael Graves
VoIP

As I travel I often fill my down time listing to various podcasts. The IT Conversations series have been a great source of inspiration and education. Today they posted a podcast of Jonathan Christensen, General Manager, Audio & Video at…

Sprint 3G Mifi @ SFO Aug 19

August 19, 2009
Michael Graves
3G Wireless

I promise that after this week I won’t focus so much on the Mifi and this Sprint 3G service. From an early Wednesday morning perspective here’s what I’m seeing for performance.

Sprint 3G Mifi @ SFO Aug 18

August 18, 2009
Michael Graves
Broadband

So here's how the Sprint 3G service measures now that I'm away from my home office location. Note that my laptop clock is on CDT. It's just before 6am west coast time. As you can see I tried tests against…

Sprint Mifi: Day #3 @ Home Office Location

August 15, 2009
Michael Graves
Broadband

I thought that I’d have another check of the Sprint 3G data rate now that we’re into the weekend. The performance in the mid-afternoon during the week was not bad at all. I was wondering if there would be any change on the weekend.

Sprint-mifi-speed-test-aug15

It seems to be markedly improved on the weekend. Today it measures: 1.94 Mb/s download, 520kbps upload with a ping time to Dallas of 155 ms. That was at around 2pm CDT.

The real test will be when I’m in SFO next week.

Inspirational Hardware: The FIT-PC Slim & FIT-PC2

My roots in VoIP are closely intertwined with embedded systems. I really like the idea of small, quiet, lower-power hardware that just runs…and runs…and runs. That’s what drove me to my 2006 article about Astlinux on Soekris hardware and was in part the genesis of this blog.

When I saw the original FIT-PC I thought that it could be an interesting platform for Asterisk. However, with its 400 MHz Geode CPU it wasn’t that much different than the Soekris platform that I was using, so there was little motivation to make the migration.

fit-PC Slim-500

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Fit-PC Slim (pictured above) is now available on sale on Amazon for a mere $159.