stillhacking

Skype'ing I have certainly known about Skype for a while now but frankly have not had the need to even try it. Last weekend I configured a cable modem in a house in a relatively remote area. We don't have a land line phone in this house and had not planned to install one. Our cell phone coverage is however a little spotty. Since the high speed connection is there I thought I would give VoIP a try. I have been very impressed. For those of us who are in the U.S., for $15/year you can get unlimited calls to anyone in the U.S. and Canada. That service is called SkypeOut. If you need an inbound number, you can get SkypeIn for about $30/year. The audio quality is very good. I don't know if that's because Skype is a proprietary protocol (as advertised) or if it's par for VoIP now. But I can say it's a lot cheaper than others I found if there's any significant use.

Yet another... earlier this evening I found yet another binding library for Swing. This one is called yasb (yes, it could be Yet Another Swing Binding library or it might be the first part of the developer's name which is Yassine Elouafi and "B" for binding). If you're wondering when we might see the code Scott Violet demoed at JavaOne or when JSR-295 will be a reality in NetBeans 6.0 (or in Java itself) you're not alone. In the meantime the brief look I have taken at yasb, has moved it to the top of my list for achieving binding in Swing while we wait for the official stuff. Check it out but don't make the same mistake I made. As the how to use tutorial says, set the component's name property to the name of the property to which you would like to bind preceded with an "@" sign. (Maybe it's because it was late on a Saturday night but I thought the idea was to change the name of the component itself which would not be a legal Java name.