I have a home phone (Vonage), a cell phone (Sprint), a cell phone extender/femto-cell (Samsung Airave), a VoIP phone connected to an Asterisk server, Skype, Adium, and a Mac Pro.

I work from home, so much of my time is spent in front of my computer. My kids are home from time to time taking a nap, and my wife is at home fairly often as well, so I wear headphones almost constantly so I can listen to music and other beeps and boops from my random communication applications without bothering others, and at a low enough level where I don't get hearing loss, but I also don't hear the outside world.

Although the poster asked only about one solution, I can see where they are getting at -- Telecom integration.

It would be convenient to be able to answer all of my various incoming communications -- cell, land line, Skype, SIP and VoIP -- on my desktop. It would also be convenient to be able to place calls from my desktop to others via whichever route I choose -- Skype, Jajah, Google Voice, SIP, cell phone, land line -- or to be able to build a little LCR (Least Cost Routing) db that chooses for me, based on criteria I can set. Having access to all of those pieces in a desktop format would enable me to do some cool stuff, and also allow providers I use to add new features via an API to make communications even easier.

As it is now, in theory this is all possible, but no one has come up with an easy way to integrate it all. Sure, there are hacks like Asterisk, but then you have to run an additional server or Virtual Machine, and it isn't for the feint of heart. A desktop app that could do this would be very slick, but there is still the difficulty of integration. Is it a single device which handles your cell and land lines? Can you transfer a call in Skype through your desktop to your home phone line, so you can take a call in the bathroom? Maybe I need to leave and want to continue talking on Jajah but transfer to my cell.

It just doesn't yet exist, and if it does, it is difficult to do.

I too was getting frustrated with Firefox. Daily restarts, things slowing down, etc. So I decided to learn a bit more about how to troubleshoot FF.

My first problem was having to shutdown and restart Firefox every time I wanted to enable or disable an Addon. Addons are EXTREMELY useful to me, both as a web surfer and a web developer. Firebug, Web Dev tools, mouse gestures, undo close tab, session savers... they all improve my web surfing experience.

So I learned about Profiles, and how to run multiple instances of Firefox SIMULTANEOUSLY each with different Profiles. This way I can run ALL the addons I want in one profile, a known-stable set of addons for daily surfing, and a set of addons for when I need to be doing web development. The fact that I can run all three simultaneously with the --no-remote flag makes this fabulous.

I took out the Firebug addon, as well as a few others, and Firefox 3.1b2 and now b3 have been much more solid and speedy than before.

The other useful thing about Firefox is the Session Manager Addon. Instead of having 4 windows each with 15 tabs open, I keep one or two Auto-Save Sessions. What does that mean? It means, I can have context-based sessions, and quickly switch between them. It even saves the text I've typed into the comment box on Slashdot but haven't submitted when I switch sessions. It means I can have a personal surfing session, a consulting session (individual sessions for each client even!), a work session, and even other specialized sessions. And I don't have to save when switching -- just choose a new session, and your current session is saved and stored away, and your new session is opened exactly where you left it 5 minutes or 5 weeks ago.

Between Profiles and Session Manager (and 1Password, but that's mac only), Firefox allows me to surf quickly, do complex tasks, and work efficiently. That is why FF is my primary browser. Sure Chrome is super-fast, and so is Safari 4, which I do use in addition to FF for simple surfing. But at the end of the day, the powerful addons are what make Firefox rock.

Looks like Sprint claimed to have deployed extra capacity. Just not enough:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/16/inauguration.phones/index.html

" To handle the increased traffic, Sprint is planning to deploy resources usually reserved for hurricanes: COWs and COLTs.

The acronyms stand for Cell On Wheels and Cell On Light Truck. The vehicles use satellite and microwave technology and act as mobile cell towers. They are typically deployed to disaster sites when towers get knocked out.

For the inauguration, Sprint says it will increase calling capacity. A COLT will be able to handle about 1,500 extra callers, though only 60 calls can go through simultaneously.

On Tuesday, Sprint technicians added 30 percent more capacity to one site on top of the World Health Organization building in downtown Washington."

60 simultaneous calls?!? Weak! 1.5 million people, let's guess 200,000 Sprint customers. Sprint would have needed 134 COLTs to handle the extra customers. I'm guessing they didn't.

Untrue -- Government officials and emergency personnel have a special code they can use to dial numbers on their cell phone, giving them priority access to the cell towers.

http://wps.ncs.gov/use.html

Dial *272 and then the number you want to call. If your phone is flagged as allowed to use WPS, then your call will be accepted and given priority over all other calls. I believe there are differing levels of access, so a local volunteer fireman might have a lower priority than say Secretary of State Clinton.

I too was about 250m from the Washington Monument, and trying and failing on the Sprint network. I had full bars, but was only able to send 3 text messages between my 10am arrival and 2pm departure. Most got rejected with Network Busy.

Calls and data never worked during that period while on the Mall.

A friend who had Verizon did not have any trouble making calls or texting.

On NANOG, a Verizon employee described that they spent 6 months planning capacity and rolling out COW's (Cell On Wheels) and had gotten either microwave or fiber connections to each COW to handle the traffic.

My Sprint phone works fine, most of the time. Though I live in Northern VA where my neighborhood seems to have bad service, even according to their coverage map.

Use JungleDisk. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It stores things to Amazon EC2 which is pretty cheap per gig per month. Keep a backup on a single drive at home, and either EC2 or your drive will go down, less likely both simultaneously. Restore from the 'net if your local copy dies. I store all my family photos, work documents and other important things there. If you don't like the monthly fee, you can always go through the hassle of backup to tape, or maintaining an account on two or three friends' servers and hope they don't shut things off. For me, a cheap network drive (non redundant) for a local copy, and EC2 for a remote, offsite copy, enabled by JungleDisk, which can also encrypt my data, is worth the $0.15/GB/month. I pay less than $10/month for 50 some-odd gigs of data I'm backing up. Probably makes less sense if you are backing up terabytes of data, but if you're doing that, you'll probably be willing to back up, then drive it off-site, for super-safe keeping.

Hmm. Except that the problem of SQlite being updated by two or more people at the same time would create problems. Unless BugIDs were md5 hashes, an insert would likely cause problems. And even md5 hashes have collisions, though pretty unlikely even if you have 100,000 bugs.

This is cool, your code can be free. But unfortunately you're still stuck with hosting the documentation on a central website of some sort. I'm hopeful someone will whip up a standard for hosting the documentation website. IE PHP + SQlite + GitTorrent docRoot == Distributed website. Now several websites could support any GitTorrent-hosted documentation. Go to any GitTorrentDoc-enabled website, type in the .torrent of the repository, and blam -- the server pulls it down (or has it already cached) and you can page through the fully-dynamic docRoot. Could even contain Trac or something, so all the bug tracking is also in the GitTorrent repository.

Or to reformat the whole file with proper indent rules for that filetype:

gg=G

Then after you've highlighted what you want, you can then type other commands.

shift-v
j j j j j
:s/foo/bar/g

replaces foo with bar in only the 5 lines you've highlighted.

Wow, that post was actually extremely useful! You'd think after 16 years of using VIM I'd have tried ":help sex" but no.

I love to use the formatting that is included. Set your filetype and syntax correctly, then type:

gg=G

Now your indent preferences, as well as the filetype specific indenting rules are applied to your whole file. Great for getting a piece of code that has horrible standards, just gg=G and you've formatted your file according to your tabstop requirements.

What I just now learned is how it all works.

gg -> Go to the first line of the file.
= -> runs 'equalprg' and if empty, either 'lisp' 'cindent' or 'indentexpr' are run.
G -> Do something from where you are now to the end of the file.

Will not work if you've set equalprg to something else.