C’mon Pidgin/libpurple

Pidgin is a pretty awesome, cross-platform, Instant Messaging client. It has the possibility of being one of the first Free cross-platform IM clients to support voice and video with the XMPP/Jabber protocol. Ticket 11075 on the Pidgin web site is for this feature request – it currently has voice and video on recent versions of GTK/Glib and supporting libraries under Linux, and Windows support is almost there (works in some snapshots, but not in any released version yet).
Pidgin use Trac for their bug list, and in here you can vote for a bug to increase it’s priority. Getting working cross-platform Voice and Video (VV) would rock, and gets my vote – if you care about open source IM video chat then take a look at ticket 11075. Right now it has 19 votes, making it the #2 ranked feature/defect, beaten only by 247: “MSN direct file transfers”. Shame I don’t have time or ability to help code.

HP Dreamscreen: time

The HP dream screen is now determined, once again, to use GMT without adjusting for BST, despite having turne don the “US Summertime” option. We still have a dead Snapfish app that sponoesnt show content and spontaneously crashes, and similarly a Facebook applicaiton that, although it shows content, also spontaneously crashes after a few hours.

I am disappointed in this product greatly. It had so much potential. HP, you’ve dropped the ball badly on this. I see Toshiba has a similar device on the market now. Perhaps they’ll produce an SDK and let developers enhance the platform.

HP P212 SCSI card that isn’t SCSI, kind of.

HP recently shipped us a P212 SCSI RAID card; this was chosen for our new Quantum tape drive. After a week of fighting with it, we tried an alternate SCSI card (non RAID) at the suggestion of Quantum, and Voila, all problems disappeared. Quantum claims (perhaps true, perhaps not) that some of the SCSI RAID cards are not implementing the full generic SCSI protocol and don’t handle having non-disk systems on their bus. So, hopefully Google picks up this HP P212 SCSI RAID card (PN: 013218-001) and anyone else struggling with this will see this!

G.E. Handheld UltraSound: from US$250,000 to US$7,000 in 5 months!

Last week I noticed the Beeb had a story on G.E.’s new hand-held ultrasound (story).

Developer GE Healthcare says the portable device, priced at about £5,000 in the UK, is not designed to replace existing machines.

I did a search around and found that it was actually released back in October 2009 (story).

GE has just unveiled this device at the Web 2.0 summit, and they estimate that its cost will be about $250,000.

So between 10th October 2009 and mid February 2010, some 19 weeks, the price has dropped by some US$240,000. That’s a drop of US$12,000 a week, US$1,800 a day, or $75 an hour. Imaging trying to put a purchase order together for one – you just can’t nail down a price. I would guess this isn’t a linear price drop, because in about 10 days from now (Feb 2010) they they would be free!
What will be interesting is when you can rent one for a few months for home use. Wow; wonder what interesting things people would ultrasound? Pets? Tracing the wiring in walls? Injuries? Perhaps they’ll be used by pro-sports players on the field to assess injury?