Thursday, January 7, 2010

emacs, *-other-window, splitting horizontally

After I upgrading to emacs-23 quite a couple of months ago, all these functions called *-other-window split my screen horizontally instead of vertically, as they have done for the last 20 years or so.
Getting it split vertically was really a pain. Today I found, that I just needed to set split-width-threshold to nil (well, I have never dreamt of that thing so far ...), best done through customization. I should have searched for that solution months ago ...

Update 2013-02-21:
I had written this article quite a while ago, but still I had neither remembered this article nor the name of the variable to customize. Well, this ocurred to me (again…) after starting to use W32 emacs [Link]. I really experience getting split frames to windows horizontally as a severe pain.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Skype starts offering SIP

I found these rather interesting news today in my e-mail from Skype.
(When I tried to read more on this on Skype.com, I found that T-Mobile currently seems to block accesses to that domain. Of course that did not stop me from doing so, but I don't think, that's a good and gentile draw on T-Mobile's side. I consider this kind of censorship rather childish.)
But further on the SIP issue!
Right now Skype offers you a subscription, that costs you n times EUR 4.95 per month, where n is the number of channels resp. maximal concurrent connections resp. "calls" you want to be able to use resp. have, incoming and outgoing calls count the same.
Right now that's nothing I want to go for, as I don't even have a "incoming Skype telephone number" (I don't want pour money on a steady monthly into yet another sink for services I don't really, really need), but I assume sooner or later, they let us dial out through SIP on a per call basis, just as they currently let me dial out on a per call basis using their proprietary software on Windows, Mac OS X or "whatever"; there they let me display my mobile phone number as "the caller", that's fair enough, I don't ask for more. I have been waiting with "all of us" for Skype to act as a SIP provider for quite a while, I am quite able to wait for that next step for another (short?) while. One step is done, the next steps will follow ...
If you search for "Skype SIP" on twitter.com, you will find, that Skype have been publishing that news on markets other than Germany at least for 4 days (as of 2010-01-05).

does T-Mobile block access to skype.com web pages through their UMTS etc.?

I guess so, as no access whatsoever seems to succeed through my Internet through UMTS with T-Mobile Germany as provider, although I can access Skype.com right now through another connection (bypassing T-Mobile Germany). No, Skype.com is no overloaded right now. I find that censoring exercised by T-Mobile quite childish and not very gentile towards their customers.