2007 is ending, time for a little personal update. No changes actually, still in Estonia, still at Skype. And still having a great time with our son.

Beginning of October, Henri started walking. That was pretty amazing to see him so happy to discover that he can walk alone. Since then, he has been using this new ability quite extensively, exploring, doing new tricks, running away when we go out. Walking has also clearly given a boost to his development. He started to understand much more when we tell him something, and now clearly understands already many words, often in French and in Estonian. He also behaves better, in the sense that now it’s much easier for him to keep himself busy alone.

He still loves to eat and is ready to try everything (such a little French he is). We try to give him healthy food, but also give him all kind of things to try. It’s so cute to see him eating pancakes. Our idea with eating education is variety, enjoying food and getting healthy habits.

More pictures to show he still is the most beautiful bonhomme in the world!

While we have been traveling a lot in the last years with Ingrid, we haven’t been really in holidays in the classical sense of the terms, where you go for a week or two to a nice place, in a hotel, and relax or do sightseeing. So this year’s trip to Paris was a first for us in that sense.

It was also the first time we left Henri for so long. He stayed the 6 days by my parents in Alsace and behaved very well. Seems he will be allowed to spend his holidays in Alsace again

It was the first time for Ingrid in Paris, and myself I had only really done some tourism in Paris over 15 years ago. So we decided to focus on sightseeing. We took the new TGV from Saverne (close to Strasbourg, where my parents live) to Paris. 2 hours for 500 km, very comfortable, cheap (we paid 100 Euros for 2 return-tickets, bought online), the TGV is really great.

We had a nice little hotel next to the rue Mouffertard called Hotel de l’Esperance. It’s a nice neighbourhood, lively and Parisian. Nice little room for only 80 Euros, cheap for a capital city. We recommend it.

We didn’t take the breakfast at the hotel, but rather bought some pain au chocolat or croissants in one of the bakery around the hotel, and went eating it in a cafe with a coffee. That’s just the right way of starting a day in France! Speaking about coffee, this is actually rather expensive (2 to 3 Euros). But Paris is actually not as expensive as one might think. Eating out is not much more expensive than Tallinn. And funnily coming from Estonia, beer costs as much or more than wine (or you could say that wine is cheap in France).

So what did we see? Lots of things, some of the highlights:

• On l’Ile de la Cite, the Notre-Dame cathedral of course, but also Sainte-Chappelle, a little church hidden between other buildings, which has an impressive amount of stained glasses. Entrance is 7 Euros, but probably worth it as it is very impressive.
• Maybe my favorite thing we visited is Le Louvre. It is absolutely huge (the biggest museum in the world) and extremely rich and interesting. We spend a long morning there but it would clearly deserve a full day. The 10 Euros entrance is worth it. There are many visitors but since the museum is so big it’s ok. However I would advise to arrive there early (before 9:30) and do immediately the most popular section, the Italian paintings and La Joconde, before the crowd of American and Japanese tourists arrives.
• The Eiffel Tower is of course a must. A great thing to do is being up in the tower by night. Paris becomes very nice and the tower itself is lighted. I think it’s enough to go to the Eiffer Tower, no need to climb up the Sacre Coeur or Notre Dame (they all cost a lot).
• And of course the Montmartre, Quartier Latin and Le Marais, which are all nice neighbourhoods of Paris.

I think we will probably go more often to Paris now, the TGV making it so close from Alsace.

Recent version of Skype for Windows allow to edit already sent chat messages. Unfortunately, Skype for Linux 1.4 won’t show the edited version unless you reload the chat history.

I have added to my Skype command-line tools a little script, which will warn you when someone edited a message by showing a message window. Then you just need to reload the chat history to see the new version in its context.

The Public API also allows to edit chat messages, but this is not supported by my script for now. See the Public API documentation for details.

I recently purchased an external USB hard drive to backup my data. I want to encrypt some of the data I put and I decided to use encfs for this. It’s a very easy way to set up an encrypted file system, a 5 minutes setup under Ubuntu Feisty. Compared to a loopback encrypted file system, it doesn’t require to specify the size ahead of time, it grows as needed.

However when backing up on a encrypted directory on my USB drive I experienced very bad performance. I found a way to improve it several times by changing the Filesystem Block Size used by encfs. By default it uses 512 bytes blocks. Increasing it to 4096 bits made it several times faster.

In fact backing up 77 MB of data was over 5 times faster. It’s still much slower than not encrypting at all however.

• 4096 block size: 1 min 43 secs (size 78856 KB)
• 512 block size: 9 mins 21 secs (size 78860 KB)
• Non encrypted: 19 secs (size 78824 KB)

The Filesystem Block Size can only be set when creating the file system. When starting encfs for the first time, choose the expert mode. Then you can choose the same options as for the standard mode (as described in the encfs man page: Blowfish algorithm, 160 bits key size, block encoding and everything else as default choices) except for the block size where you should choose 4096. You may also choose the AES algorithm with a 256 bits key. In my tests it was even slightly faster than the less secure Blowfish algorithm (1 min 41 secs).

Update: I ended up not using encfs at all on my USB drive, as I found out that TrueCrypt was much faster, in fact there is no penalty for the encryption. One has to choose the size of the file system before, but that is a small price to pay for speed. It is easy to install under Ubuntu and is also supported under Windows.

Nokia has released a firmware update for the N800 (which I reviewed before) with a great new application, Skype. We have been working with Nokia on this client and I must say the result is very nice, this is a great looking, fast, well done interface. Besides voice calls, it supports chats and multi-chats, one of the best chat implementation we have on devices. There is no video, file transfer or SMS support however.

I’m looking forward to the reviews, and I would be happy to hear feedback about it. You can leave me a comment or ping me over Skype.

where on Sunday morning you meet the Prime Minister’s wife;
in the afternoon you are listening to a choir of 20.000 children, with 100.000 spectators - out of 1.4 millions living in Estonia;
you get shivers when all the big final choir with all children sing the national hymn;
on Tuesday you have a glass with the French ambassador and meet the Prime Minister’s EU affairs advisor;
and on Thursday evening discover a wonderful new little restaurant just around the corner of your apartment;
all this with a great sunny weather - while it doesn’t stop raining in France.

Life is nice

JAJAH is running a campaign targeted at Skype’s users, campaign which focuses on how you don’t need a headset with JAJAH. Of course these days a headset is not at all required anymore for making Skype calls. Jim Courtney lists some of the options for using Skype without headset, the first one being simply to use a recent version of Skype. Thanks to our recent improvements in echo cancellation, I have regularly calls without headset using the microphone of my webcam (using the webcam microphone helps I think, as it is situated further from the speaker than the laptop integrated microphone, making the job of the echo cancellation software easier).

But the headset is not a bad thing at all, on the contrary. I think the headset is in fact a great feature of Skype, as it allows individual private calls without tying one of your hand against your ear. Often these headsets have several meters long cables and one can even walk around.

Today Skype standalone devices use the classical phone form factor (the handset). An interesting Skype device would be a cordless headset. Such a device should be composed of a comfortable headset connected via DECT to a base station. The screen and keypad would be on the base station (like a corded phone). We use DECT and not Bluetooth because we want the simplicity, great range and good battery life of DECT. The headset should go on both ears, as it is much more comfortable than the one-ear Bluetooth headsets sold for mobile phones. It is for home use, so size is not an issue.

Having the screen and keypad on the base station is a minor inconvenient: In general a cordless phone is anyway on the base station when not in use, to charge the batteries. Which means when you receive a call or want to make a call, you have to go to the base station anyway.

Skype for Linux 1.4 doesn’t support sending SMS in the User Interface yet, but the functionality is supported in the core library used in this release, thus it is possible to send SMS using the Public API.

I have added to my Skype command-line tools a little application for sending SMS. Usage is simple, call it with the phone number and the message to send:

$ ./sk_send_sms.py PHONENUMBER Hello world

Of course you need Skype credit for this to work. The tool doesn’t implement validating your phone number. This allows recipients of your SMS to see your mobile number as the sender, instead of the first 11 characters from your Skype Name. This can be done with Skype for Windows.

Update 2007-08-30: About the Initialization failed errors that some got, they are probably because “sms_sender” is not authorized to connect to Skype. First time the script is launched, Skype asks if you want to authorize it to connect to Skype. Later the authorized applications can be seen in Options => Public API. I fixed the scripts to show better error messages in this case.

Update 2007-12-12: I rewrote the script to use the Skype4Py wrapper. Hopefully this should solve the issues people have been seeing. As a bonus it should now work under Windows and Mac too (didn’t test that).

Skype for Linux 1.4, like other desktop clients, supports the Skype Public API, which allows other applications to make use of Skype features.

I started a set of command-line tools for Skype Linux to do various things that cannot be done with the user interface. The first of these tools allows to find and open old multi-chats, even the ones that have disappeared from the recent chat list in the UI or are not bookmarked.

The tools are Python scripts, and with them also comes a simple Python wrapper around the Public API.

To get them see the Skype for Linux Tools page.

Since Skype is being ported on the Nokia N800, I had the chance to use the N800 quite a bit in the last months. Last year I reviewed the first iteration of Nokia’s Internet Tablet, the N770. The N800 is definitively a nice upgrade over it, it keeps the strong points and fix some of the weaknesses.

The hardware has been upgraded, with a faster CPU and more RAM, making it much more responsive. The browser for example loads fast now, zooming in/out is smooth and the additional RAM makes it possible to have several applications opened at the same time.

The form-factor is nicer. I like the new stand, practical, better than the N770 solution. The screen is still gorgeous. Big improvement, the N800 now supports standard SD cards. They are very cheap these days, so it becomes very easy to add a lot of storage to the device, opening possibilities for it as a music and video player. The Wifi connectivity is still very good, as is battery life. This device can just be kept on all the time and be always accessible.

The N800 is a very good video player. Under Linux this excellent script will convert your videos to a format that will fit nicely on the N800. I tried some DIVX files and the quality was excellent. With the best preset of the script, 25 minutes of video took 100 MB.

The N800 of course includes a music player. One nice use for it is to access your music collection stored on a PC in the house. The PC needs to have a UPnP server (like uShare or GMediaServer under Linux) and you can then browser and listen to your music collection on the N800. A great way to have your music collection follow you in the house. The device now has stereo speakers so it’s even possible to listen to music without headset (but don’t expect miracles in term of quality).

Another music use for the N800 is to use it as a remote control for your media center (a PC with all your music and connected to your stereo, but without a keyboard or mouse). If the PC runs Linux, you can install the Music Player Daemon on it. It is a music player without user interface, allowing various clients to connect to it. And there is a client for the N800.

Some things still bother me with the device. Like the N770, it is missing a scroll wheel, and scrolling is just too slow on it. The web browser is missing tabs too. The way I’m using a web browser most of the time is by opening tabs in the background, allowing me to continue reading the current page. On my laptop this is a one click operation, on the N800 it requires way too many clicks.

It still doesn’t have a retractable keyboard, but this isn’t such a big deal anymore because there is a very good on-screen finger keyboard. It has big keys and it allows to type with your fingers, which is faster than using the stylus.

Already a cool device, with Skype it will be even better