Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

I recently switched to ViaTalk for my home phone. ViaTalk has somewhat of a reputation for not being user friendly, but if you’re a typical do-it-yourselfer, it’s a pretty good deal. I’m paying less than half of what I paid with Vonage and the ability to blacklist phone numbers over the web is absolutely great. ViaTalk does not supply you with a softphone, but it does provide you with the settings to use with 3rd party softphone software. CounterPath (http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite-download.html) offers both free and not-free softphone products. X-Lite 4.0 beta is the free softphone that will work with OSX Snow Leopard. The default settings did not work for me. I could place and receive calls, but I could not hear the other party while they could hear me. I’m fairy sure this problem was caused by routing confusion dealing with NAT. I finally figured out the settings that make everything work (see screen shot below). This setup makes me pretty happy. I’m saving money, I can blacklist phone spammers, I have callerid on my desktop softphone and it works well using my built-in speaker and microphone as well as my Logitech USB headset.

While trying to install the latest update to Parallels Desktop 5, I ran into an installation road block because the installer claimed 10 different Parallels applications were running and needed to be closed. Clearly, this was not the case. My first thought was to blame Parallels, but then an Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader update failed for the same reason–the installer claimed certain applications were running when they were not. While using the OS X Terminal, I realized certain commands were not working. I could not “less” a file. “grep” returned nothing even when I searched for strings that were clearly there. It turns out my entire /usr/bin directory had multiple executable files showing 0 bytes! “less” showed 0 bytes and also showed thousands of links to it–the same was true for many standard command line utilities. Installers like Parallels and Adobe depend on command line utilities found in /usr/bin. For example, to determine if certain programs are running, the installer will run a shell script that uses the “ps” command. If you’re curious what that would look like, here is the exact script that Parallels Desktop 5 uses:

#!/bin/sh

if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Server.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then

exit 1

fi

if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Service.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then

exit 1

fi

exit 0