Prophecy 2006

Voxeo informs me that the problem I reported with unjoin followed by a join is actually a different problem entirely: a join in half-duplex mode does not issue a "conference.joined" event.

A good workaround, which I may or may not try in the near future, is to issue this event myself with a half-second delay, or (perhaps better) issue some other disposable event.

I can now proceed to testing mute/unmute via web page, but that's likely to be on hold until after the SpeechTek conference.

Since I avoid Internet Explorer like the plague -- after all, like the plague, IE tends to infect things -- I never even thought to test Voice Conference Manager's Monitor Page with IE.

Voxeo did think to test it, and pointed out that it didn't work with IE. Not only that, but Don Lawsom of Voxeo provided an updated Javascript file that's compatible with Firefox and IE. I've updated VCM, and you can download the latest push2web package if you want IE compatibility and slightly improved aesthetics.

After some testing by Voxeo, I've re-released Voice Conference Manager's push2web and vcm-prophecy packages. These changes make out-of-the-box installation far easier.

If you posted a comment that you never saw on the web site, please accept my apologies. I thought the site would notify me of comments waiting for approval, but it did not. I've just approved these comments, and I hope to reply to them.

I highly recommend that you get your own login, which will let you post comments without waiting for administrator approval. And if you have a login, you have a blog, and I'd be delighted if you'd contribute.

I've just deleted 2,400 comments that were spam; almost all of them were from netcathost.com, a server in Kiev. I've installed an anti-spam module. If that doesn' work, I will probably be forced to prohibit comments from anyone who is not a registered user.

If I'm reading the rankings correctly, Voice Conference Manager is project number 733 at Sourceforge. That puts VCM well into the top 0.1% of all 125,000 projects hosted by Sourceforge, which is nothing shabby.

I've released new versions of Voice Conference Manager for Prophecy, as well as the companion push2web package.

For the first time, you can drop calls by using the VCM Monitor web page. (Muting will work once the P2006 unjoin/join bug is fixed.) The page also looks a bit nicer -- it now uses CSS, and there's a separate table for each individual call. The status of the call updates in real time.

I've eliminated, for the time being, the automatic dropping of calls when there's only one person left on a conference. Unless there's a conference object and a separate CCXML instance to manage it, in my professional opinion any effort to supply this capabilties leads to a state machine implemented in CCXML, which in turn leads to some very poor programming practices. I might be able to implement "drop last attendee" capability as a distributed state maangement system, and in fact I've tried, but I'm not happy with the results so far. (Expect a short essay on this topic sometimme soon.)

You can download the package from the Voice Conference Manager web site.

One company just canceled their participation in SpeechTek, and I have a panel slot and a workshop slot open. See my previous comments for details, then drop me a line immediately if you would like to participate.

If no one else steps forward, I may present Voice Conference Manager.

I've just tried to see if the conference object is working in build 126, and it's not.

According to the W3 spec, a conference.created should have a "conferenceid" attribute, which P2006 does have, and a "conference" attribute that is an ECMAScript object, which P2006 does not.

The conference object in turn should have a "bridges" attribute. The length of that array would tell me how many connections are up on the conference object, and that's a number I need to track.

I've got a very simple need: I want the JavaScript (ECMAScript) object I create to pass between scripts, and I want everyone to have access to it.

That is, if I create an array object and send it to scripts A, B, and C, I want scripts A, B, and C to each be able to access the array elements -- simultaneously -- and modify them.

That isn't too much to ask, because I can already do something similar with other P2006 objects, such as the conference object.

Since I've been pounding on this for a couple of hours, it's time to ask Voxeo tech if they support this or not. I've asked before...

Here's a progress report. As of yesterday, I can use a web page to drop a phone call. The person who is dropped gets an annoucement that the call is being dropped by the moderator.

Other people on the call aren't so lucky -- the last person on the call is dropped without any explanation. It's on the to-do list; the logic of how calls are dropped need further work.

The updates will be available on the VCM web site soon -- in fact, this latest update deserves a seperate package release. Right now Sourceforge, which hosts VCM, is having trouble with its version control (Subversion); as soon