Matt Silverman

Update 8/29/09: Check out my new Post on how Ooma + iPhone = Amazing Voicemail

It’s been about 5 months since I started using Ooma.  I must say that overall the service has been spectacular.  While I still worry that they will be able to keep up their business model, I was reassured after talking to an Ooma tech who told me that a very large percentage of their customers opt-in for the paid monthly service.

Some important things to note:

Quality of Service, Bandwidth

Despite setting up Quality of Service in my router, I occasionaly notice that the Ooma service gets fuzzy if I am running any network intensive applications including my Network Security Camera.  I noticed that if I am watching the network camera while away from home, and if someone is using the Ooma phone while at home, the service can get a bit shoddy.  This is not a problem for only Ooma, but any VOIP phone service.

I still need to tinker with the QoS settings a little more to make sure that my router gives Ooma priority bandwidth.  Even when downloading large files, Ooma does not seem to be affected, but with large upload activity from things like Bittorrent, and upstreaming of video, you may get different results.

System-Wide Service Reliability

Ooma experienced a system-wide service interruption on April 13th, 2009.  This happened to be on a day that I was implementing an Ooma system in a retail environment, and it caused some major headaches.  The main problem was that Ooma did not make any kind of e-mail blast, or noticable announcement on the web site, so I only assumed that there was a problem locally with our network or Ooma hub.

Since the outage, Ooma has implemented a number of corrective actions that will hopefully help not only alert us if an outage occurs, but prevent any future system-wide outages from occurring again.  Especially nice is their new Ooma_Status Twitter account to keep you up to date on system issues.

Overall after 5 months:

Very happy I did not go with Vonage and waste ~$25+ per month.  No noticable quality difference between Ooma and a regular landline phone.  It really beats talking on a cell phone too in terms of clarity.

Neat little tip:

You can disable that weird Ooma chime that plays every time you pick up and place a call.  Sign into the Ooma Lounge.

Click on Preferences > System.

Then in the drop down box, select “(Disabled)” for Ooma connection tone.  After about 3 minutes, your phone should have a regular dial tone, and no longer have the weird Ooma tune.

Update 8/29/09: Check out my new Post on how Ooma + iPhone = Amazing Voicemail

Just a little shortcut.  I happened to be using a locked down Windows Vista computer that would not let me access the “properties” of the My Computer icon.  I needed to change the computer workgroup, and could not seem to get into it.  I looked to see if there was a registry entry to edit for workgroup, but instead came up with this alternative.

To edit the properites of My Comptuer in Windows Vista or Windows XP:

1. Start > Run
2. Enter: sysdm.cpl and hit enter

Update 8/23/09 Despite all of the hard work getting PHP installed on Windows Vista, I found a pre-configured WAMP stack that works great inVista  Check out Server2Go!  You can even install it right to a thumb drive.

Update 8/14/09 – After finding many limitations in ultimately successful set-up of LAMP on Windows Vista, I caved in and set up a Linux server for under $200.  After all is said and done, this proved to be a much better, and seamless solution to having a local production environment.

These instructions were adapted from a nice tutorial found at iis.net.

Before you begin:

• I recommend the text editor Notepad++ for editing config files.
• If you are like me, you may have remnants of unsuccessful PHP/MySQL attempts installed on your Vista machine.  In order to be successful in this installation, you must uninstall any previous installations of PHP, MySQL, XAMPP, WAMP, etc.

Download the latest PHP .zip package for Windows.

Create a folder named php on your c:drive, and extract the zip file there.  The path will be c:/php.

After the files have unzipped, open the c:\php\php.ini-dist file in Notepad++, then hit file, save as, and save a copy of the file to the c:\windows\ folder, naming it php.ini.

Next, you need to install IIS 7 by going to My Computer, “Uninstall or Change a Program,” and then “Turn Windows Features on or off”

Navigate to “Internet Information Services” and enable the Web Management Tool and WWW Services selected below:

After clicking OK, it will take around 5 minutes for all of the components to install.  Then open the IIS Manager by going to Start > Run > C:\windows\system32\inetsrv\inetmgr.exe

Double click on “Handler Mappings”:

Click “Add Script Map”

Now, map *.php to your php5asapi.dll file which you most likely extracted to c:/php.

Click yes to Allow ISAPI extension:

Open up Notepad++ (start > run > notepad++ ).  Create a new blank page and write it it:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Then save the file into the c:\inetpub\wwwroot with the name test.php.  Navigate your browser to http://localhost/test.php

If you see the standard PHP info page, then you can take a sign of relief, as PHP is now successfully installed on your Windows Vista machine.  Now it’s time to make a few more tweaks.

Let’s set it so windows knows to default to index.php when visiting a directory via HTTP.  Go back to the IIS Manager: C:\windows\system32\inetsrv\inetmgr.exe

Double click on “Default Document”:

Click “Add.”

Type “index.php” and hit OK.

Now, let’s make a few quick edits to the php.ini file in your C:/Windows directory.  Open up Notepad++ and then open php.in C:/Windows/php.ini .  We need to set the correct extension directory if you ever plan to use an extension like MySQL.  To do that, simply edit the following line (line number may change on future released of php).  Note that when we originally unzipped the PHP files, we saved it to a folder like C:/php.  We have to tell the php.ini file where this folder is in order for the extensions to run properly:

Since we’re in php.ini, we might as well make a few more changes that will help our future installation of MySQL and other applications.  Create a folder in C:/Temp called phpsessions.  Then edit the following line of php.ini so PHP knows where to save your temporary session files:

Finally, we need to enable some necessary extensions in the php.ini file.  To do this, we simply delete the semicolon from the beginning of the following lines:

Ok, final final step.  Go to the folder you originally unzipped PHP to, copy the libmcrypt.dll and libmysql.dll and paste them to your c:/windows directory.  This will be necessary later when we install MySQL.

Your all set for PHP.  Stay tuned.. I will update this page with a link to the Installing MySQL on Windows Vista next.

Update 8/14/09 – After finding many limitations in ultimately successful set-up of LAMP on Windows Vista, I caved in and set up a Linux server for under $200.  After all is said and done, this proved to be a much better, and seamless solution to having a local production environment.

Update 8/23/09 Despite all of the hard work getting PHP installed on Windows Vista, I found a pre-configured WAMP stack that works great inVista  Check out Server2Go!  You can even install it right to a thumb drive.

We had a weight loss competition at work.  The rules were simple: Put money into a pot, and anyone who loses 7% of his or her body weight by February 19th, gets the pot.

Out of 17 people who entered, I believe 14 people actually won.  It was not a fun month, to say the least, but I learned a lot of things.

1.  Interval workouts burn fat.
I worked out about 5 days per week, for 30-50 minutes each time.  Since sweating is the key to a successful workout, I needed a way to get sweaty, and fast.  I used a homemade interval technique through trial and error.  It consisted of a 2:1 running, walking ratio.  I started at 6mph/3.8mph.  I repeated this interval workout for as long as 50 minutes on some days.  It would take only 8 minutes from the start to get the sweat pouring out.  The constant increase and decrease of your heart rate makes your body sweat off the pounds, and if you stick to it, it works.

2.  Avoid Saturated Fats at all costs.
I love bacon, cheese, rich desserts, and all those other wonderful things that are loaded with sat fats.  I had to almost completely cut them out during the competition.  One of the most important lessons I learned from the Abs Diet Book is that saturated fats are what help pad your stomach.  It hurt, but the two notches I lost on my belt indicate that it worked.

3.  Don’t eat less food.
Unless you incredibly strong willed, you will not ever successfully lose weight by simply eating less food.  If we had that kind of self control, who would ever need dieting and exercise to begin with?  The trick is the eat the same amount of food, if not more, but fill your diet with tons of vegetables instead.  I ate salads,by the truck load, and used either Fat Free, or small amounts of low-fat dressing.

4.  Protein, Protein, Protein.
With my trusty flavorless Whey Protein powder, it was easy to add some extra protein to my diet.  My choice method was mixing it one full scoop with my plain oatmeal in the morning.  Flavorless whey is definitely the way to go, by the way.

5.  Drink lots of water.
Yeah, this one does not sound so important, but it makes a big difference.  Get a big water jug, and go crazy.

Thanks to some intense translating work by Rafael, BestViral Brazil was launched this week.  Check it out, and leave some feedback.

We’re working on getting a domain for BestViral Spanish, but for now you can check it out at sp.bestviral.com.  Many thanks to Danny Zadoff for heading up this project.