skype

Skype – the master of parallel universes

For reasons that I totally don’t understand, many companies choose Skype as a standard communication application. I’d understood such a decision if they were using voice or video calls. But they don’t. Chat only. And pretty much everyone knows how horrible Skype is for chats. It’s slow, often losing offline messages, its history management is horrible, etc, etc, etc. But today’s post is not about that.

It’s about parallel universes. And how Skype is the master of them. Consider my example from this morning. I came to work, logged in to Skype, saw who is online and started chatting with one of the co-workers. In the meantime, a guy next to me was doing exactly the same thing – came in, logged in to Skype, saw who is online, and started chatting with another co-worker. But the interesting bit was that we couldn’t see each other online. If we tried to send messages or files to each other, they’d fail complaining that the other party is offline. The same was true for those co-workers with who we were chatting, they couldn’t see the other half of the office, which was online, chatting, and couldn’t see the first half of the office.

Is there any other explanation except that Skype managed to create at least two separate, parallel universes and signed in half of our office into one universe, and the second half of the office into another universe? I can’t think of one…

Linux, Skype, and web camera

I’ve been using Skype for a few years now, but mainly for chats. Occasionally, I’d do a call, but that never involved video. Until recently. A couple of days ago my dad got online (finally!). And now there is a good reason to use Skype with a web camera for video calls.

One of the key points in Fedora 12 release notes was about improved support of video cameras. That I was glad to hear. I got my hands onto several web cameras and all of them seemed to work just fine in Cheese – a video capture application. However, none of these cameras worked in Skype. Either they were not recognized by Skype, or Skype was crashing, or I was getting really weird green-screen output, or something else.

It turned out, that there is something I had to do. First, check if libv4l package is installed, and if it isn’t – “yum install libv4l“. That’s a video for Linux library. Second, start Skype like this: “LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype“. Once I did that, Skype / Options / Video Devices confirmed that video is working fine.

Skype video

On the quality of voice in the phone conversation

Tom Evslin has this interesting observation about the quality of voice in the traditional phone:

The bandwidth of the telephone connection between our homes and the telephone network hasnâ€™t changed in my long lifetime. Although some noise has been eliminated in long distance calls (sometime and if weâ€™re not on a cellphone), voices on the phone still sound like they did sixty-five years ago. Weâ€™ve trained ourselves to accept the clipped quality of a telephone voice with its lack of emotional overtones.
You wouldnâ€™t dream of listening to music over the phone. You expect and get much better sound quality from almost any radio and on TV. Movies have Dolby sound. But the telephone is still the telephone.

He suggests that VoIP (think: Skype) is changing that.

Google’s business domain

While trying to investigate a bit into the rumor of Google buying Skype, I ran across this rather lengthy post. In there, I stumbled upon a thought which is simple and rather obvious, but which I haven’t had yet:

Google isn’t a search engine company; it brokers connections between people and corporations for profit.[…] Search is just one, albeit dominant.

New Skype beta for Linux

If you missed the announcements, Skype has released a new beta version for Linux (1.30). It has a long expected ALSA support, which can solve a whole lot of sound problems. Also, there are now many options in the Sound tab of Configuration menu. It is possible to set your favourite WAV files as notification alerts and even a ringtone. Hopefully, one day there’ll be an option to set per contact ringtones… There are a few other small changes here and there, which might be more imoprtant to you, than they are for me. So, you should check it out yourself too.