Demolition Day!

From now on, Friday June 10th 2011 will be known as Demolition Day!  At noon, my collegue Bert and I decided to join forces and get ready for some reinforced concrete pole demolition action.  Bart decided to go for the hard work...

... while Bert preferred the more subtle steel cutting action:

After less then 30 minutes, the job was done...

...and we decided to reward our efforts with some nice French fries from frituur De Beke.  Yummie!

Perfect sky

People sometimes ask me what the best weather conditions are for paragliding.  Whell... today, I think we got pretty close:

The gray building you see is where I work.  The picture was taken at 17h43.  Observe the nice, little, white and fluffy clouds.  At the bottom they are flat (that's cloudbase).  At the top they have more irregular shapes.  These kind of clouds are perfect indicators of rising air: they show us where the thermals end.  All we paragliding pilots have to do, is circle around underneath them and hope that we will go up :-)

The other nice thing about the cloud-formation in the above picture, is that the clouds are quite close together, forming nice cloud streets.  Paragliding pilots try to hop from the bottom of one cloud to the other, thereby trying to fly as far a distance as possible.

Ekiga.net and Android... mobile VoIP without tears!?

Now that Skype has fallen into the hands of Microsoft, I am exploring the VoIP market for more open and free video-chat solutions.  Without doubt, the alternative is SIP.  If you support the Open Source philosophy, you quickly end up finding Ekiga a good SIP-client because it is free and works for both Linux and Windows.  Consequently, you create yourself an Ekiga.net account.  I have such an account, and now I want to start using it with my Google Samsung Nexus S smartphone, running Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread.  My most important goals are:

• being able to make SIP video-calls
• doing this from behind my wireless router or NAT
• being reachable at my ekiga.net SIP-address

Getting things up and running seems not so easy, especially because I do not only want voice, but also video.  Within this post, I will try to summarize my findings concerning Ekiga.net and Android-based smartphones.

Interesting to know is that most of the times, I'm behind a wireless router with all the NAT-trouble that comes with it.  So quite frequently, when my Nexus S connects over WiFi to the Internet, it has a local IP-address within the 192.168.1.X range.  For SIP, this often seems to be the bottleneck...

Android 2.3.4 native SIP-client
If you are behind NAT, then with this client you will not be able to register and get a `606 Not Acceptable' answer from the ekiga.net server. This problem is also nicely described at http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#ekiga.net

As long as Android's native SIP-client does not support some kind of NAT-traversal technology like STUN, ICE,... you will not be able to register.  See also the feature request at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15685

Sipdroid 2.2 beta
Registering with Sipdroid works just fine.  However, to traverse the NAT, you must enable the use of a STUN Server under the Advanced Options.  The name of the STUN server is stun.ekiga.net and the STUN Server port is 3478.

I have been able to make voice-calls with this client, but no video-calls.  If anybody knows how to do it, please let me know!

CSipSimple
With this client it is currently not possible to make video calls, but support seems to be on the way, see http://code.google.com/p/csipsimple/issues/detail?id=112&q=video

Jitsi
This client has no port to Android yet, but according to http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#android this is planned for 2011 or 2012.

Digging it flat

Today was the day: I was going to spade the garden and I was going to do it fast!  The plan was to get started this morning and see how far I could get.  While I was digging my way towards hallucinations, Tine closely followed me with a rake to fine tune the result of my intensive labour.  At 19h30 local Belgian time, the end result is something we are both very proud of:

 

Seems like it's getting time for a call to Mr. Gardener!

Concretely getting rid of concrete

In one or the other way, I have to get rid of 5 reinforced concrete poles in my `garden'.  I was able to dig them out, but now I have to somehow transport them to the dumping ground.  Because these things are quite heavy, this is a difficult task for a man without a car.  I think I have two options:

1. According to this page i apparently have the right to get one free (big) garbage collection from the city of Kortrijk.  I could use my free ticket for this year to get rid of my concrete poles...
2. I could use a grinding disc, cut the 5 big ones into smaller chunks and drop the chunks myself at the dumping ground.  The only problem is that I don't have a grinding disc :-(

If anybody can help me out with my poles, please contact me!

Killing the buxus!

It has been almost 3 years now that we have this big, fat buxus in our garden.  Tine liked it, i didn't.  I wanted to get rid of it.  After I finally convinced her that removing this damn thing was like the best thing we could do to the world, today was D-day: time for destruction!  This is the sucker before I attacked him:

This is how the bastard looked like after a few strokes with my saw:

And a few more cuts later, he didn't seem to be too happy anymore:

The final struggle to the root was damn hard, but the battle was won by me and I nailed the damn thing.  Look at him crying for his mommy:

Of course, I could not have done this without the help of my brave son, who's always ready for some buxus-destruction:

Thanks, Jenne!

Airtour 2011 cancellation

Yesterday, I decided to withdraw from the Airtour 2011 hike-and-fly paragliding
competition.  I do this for personal reasons and because my family is of the
uttermost importance to me.  My cancellation might come as a surprise to the
people who know me and who know how higly motivated I was to take part in this
race.  Deciding not to compete was quite difficult, but I know for sure that it
was the right thing to do.  My family needs me and i want to be there for them.